On the night of March 1, 86 BC, Athens was bound to live one of the greatest disasters in its history. After the month-long siege, the armies of the Roman general Sulla captured the city, killed part of its population, pillaged and levelled many areas. Among them the excavation site.

Years after, when new residents came to settle in the neighbourhood, they cleared the debris from the houses and discarded the destroyed household equipment into pits, water wells and cisterns. One such cistern was the dumping place for the objects presented here. This is how an ancient catastrophe became the reason to reconstruct today the equipment of a 1st century BC house and to obtain information about its form and the dietary and other habits of its inhabitants.

Cistern III, as it is conventionally called, was the water reservoir of House Λ, a house located in the western part of the excavation, which was also destroyed by the Roman army. Dozens of minor objects and thousands of fragments of clay pots were recovered from its interior and a significant part was able to be restored.

These were vessels for transporting, storing and measuring products, vessels for preparing, making and serving food, containers for oil and herbs, jugs and wine cups, beehives for honey production, lamps and loom weights, as well as vessels for perfume, cosmetics and jewellery. The original household equipment would have been certainly much larger if one considers vessels made of perishable materials that have not survived, or those made of metal that were recycled.

The large number and type of vessels, some of which were measuring utensils, lead to the suggestion that some kind of shop for selling liquid or solid products was operating out of the house’s ground floor. This hypothesis is reinforced by the 19 lead tokens found inside the cistern (thematic section: Trade and Economy, nos 63-81), which might have been used as coupons for purchasing the products.