Emily Chan
Around 1,600 years ago, a wine shop from the Roman era was destroyed after a “sudden event” that caused its owners to abandon it.
Now, archaeologists have uncovered the building’s remains at a site in the ancient city of Sicyon located in modern-day southern Greece.
The shop was open for business during the reign of the Roman Empire. Inside the wine shop, there were marble tabletops, 60 coins strewn about on the floor, and broken vessels created from bronze, glass, and ceramic.
The coins date back to a time when Constantius the Second ruled the empire, which lasted from 337 to 361 C.E. The latest coin was minted sometime between 355 and 361.
“The coins were all found on the floor of the [shop], scattered across the space,” said Scott Gallimore, an assistant professor of archaeology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada.
“This seems to indicate that they were being kept together as some type of group, whether in a ceramic vessel or some type of bag. When the [shop] was destroyed, that container appears to have fallen to the floor and scattered the coins.”
Experts can’t say for sure why the shop’s inhabitants left it behind so suddenly, but they believe the mysterious event could have been an earthquake or heavy rainfalls, causing the structure to collapse.
After the building crumbled, there were signs of people dumping debris and sediment onto its remains, but no one sifted through the waste to try to salvage anything from it.
The wine shop was found within a complex of workshops that contained areas for kilns and equipment used for pressing grapes or olives.
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