What can be learned from a small rescue excavation?

In 1984 I was invited to oversee a small rescue excavation on the Kophinás ridge adjacent to the North West edge of the city of Khios. Excavations had been conducted on the Kophinás by the British School 32 years earlier and had revealed, in addition to some tombs of Hellenistic and Roman tombs, a series of enigmatic pits excavated into the soft, argillaceous bedrock. Although the 1984 excavation only revealed one more of these pits, details of that feature suggested that these pits may have been intended to extract the fine clay used for the white slip characteristic of archaic Khiot pottery. This new pit, like some of those previously examined, had been filled with débris (ranging in date from Archaic to early Hellenistic) gathered up from an apparently residential area in the early 3rd century BCE. 

A separate small rescue excavation conducted by my colleague Áris Tsaravópoulos in the South West part of the city had revealed another refuse deposit whose accumulation, like that at Kophinás, ends by the middle of the 3rd century BCE. In both cases much of the pottery and small objects showed signs of burning suggesting that some sort of conflagration in at least the two parts of the city may have caused destruction needing clearance for reconstruction. Here, however, the similarity of the two deposits ends for, in the South West, a break in the sequence of filling material may reflect the savage destruction of the island at the hands of the Persians in 493 BCE; what is more the material accumulated may indicate some sort of concentration of industrial activities in the South West of the city.