Image Details

A marble chalice probably imported ready-made to Akrotiri. Marble and other rare stones such as serpentine and steatite, none of them native to the island, were most often used in basins, pyxides (small boxes), oil lamps and rhytons (ritual drinking vessels). More mundane stones, especially black, volcanic basalt, remained popular on Thera well into the Bronze Age (first half of the second millennium B.C.), no doubt because of their hardness and their relative abundance on the island. Basalt hammers and anvils were especially common; a few extremely large hammers, weighing more than 30 pounds, may have been used to demolish shaky walls left standing after the earthquakes that preceded Thera’s eruption.