During the ongoing field season, we continued excavating in quadrants 102.100b and 102.100d in the E part of the mound, which we had begun to investigate during the 2015 season. At that time, in quadrant 102.100d excavation had stopped after removing the latest layer of the Early Medieval period, whereas in quadrant 102.100b we had only been able to remove the thick surface soil accumulation. The aim of the excavation was to explore the inner court of the palace in the portion which is located to the west of rooms nos. 19 and 20, which had been investigated during the previous seasons.
The excavated area extends to the E of the pillared portico in front of rooms nos. 19 and 20 (Fig. 17). In this area, the Hellenistic level lies at a depth of more than 2 m from the present surface. After the violent destruction of the palace, the area had remained inhabited until, in the Early Medieval period (at the beginning of the 4th century BC) it became the seat of a village. The new inhabitants built their dwellings directly on the remains of the palace, thereby incorporating parts of the still standing walls of the latter. The main building of the Early Medieval level, which was apparently covered by a tiled roof, was probably located on the highest part of the mound, i.e. exactly in the area of our present excavation. In the course of the excavation, we found numerous fragments of tiles lying directly on the remains of the Hellenistic palace. For this reason, we suppose that the building, as we already mentioned in the previous reports, had been completely obliterated by surface erosion. In the course of the previous seasons, we excavated a wine-cellar located to the E of this supposed building. This was equipped with large wine pithoi (qvevri) which had been deepened into the debris of the Hellenistic palace.
In facts, the altitude at which the Hellenistic level is preserved is highest in the area, to the E of quadrants 102.100b and 102.100d, which corresponds to the location of the rooms and peristyle of the palatial building, and abruptly decreases toward the west in the area previously occupied by the inner court. As a consequence, the remains of the medieval building slope in the same direction until the NW limit of quadrant 102.100d, where we discovered the rim of one of the large wine pithoi, which had been set into the floor and surrounded by clay plaster.
Several pits of different size and depth, some of which were filled with cobble-stones (Fig. 18), had been dug from the Medieval levels. The majority of these pits just reached the level of the floor of the Hellenistic court, but two of them, located at the W limit of quadrant 102.100b, cut into it, and reached the Early Iron Ege level. Most of the finds (pot-sherds, animal bones and tile fragments) from the other pits date to the 4th-6th centuries BC, but the deepest ones contained also some Iron Age pot-sherds. In addition, the pits contained sporadic out-of place sherds from much older occupation layers of the mound: e.g., one Kura-Araxes and one Sarmatian arrow-head (Fig. 19) were brought to light in the same pit.
After completing the investigation of the Medieval level, at the end of the 2016 season we exposed over the whole excavated area the floor of the court of the Hellenistic building, which directly underlay it. The floor was lying at a slightly lower level than the floor of the adjacent peristyle; it was covered by a 3-4 cm thick burnt layer which contained abundant wood charcoals. Except for some post-holes (Fig. 20), no other structures or installations were discovered on the floor surface in the excavated area. This suggests that this portion of the court was open for circulation, and at most equipped with some simple wooden structures.
