Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/80
preserved in several places. Neither baked nor unbaked bricks were found here. The settlement stood on the slope, which fell off from south to north, the ground being 2 m. higher on the south side than on the north. We found here many small shells, but not in such masses as in the following prehistoric cities; besides, they seem to have been contained in the clay of the house-walls or terraces, and consequently cannot be considered as kitchen refuse, like a large part of those of the later settlers.
As before mentioned, the ruins denote only one or two large edifices on Hissarlik: we may therefore presume, with the greatest probability, that this first settlement had a lower city, which extended on the plateau to the west, south, and south-east; and indeed the large masses of pottery I found there in the lowest stratum in my trenches and shafts, the form and fabric of which is perfectly identical with that of the first settlement on the Acropolis hill, can leave no doubt in this respect. This first settlement appears to have existed here for a great number of centuries, for the débris had time to accumulate and to form a stratum having an average depth of 2.50 m.
As even mere fragments of pottery from this first and most ancient settlement are remarkable, and welcome to every museum, I gathered all we found, and was able to fill with them no less than eight large boxes. I also carefully collected all the bones I could find, and sent a whole box-full of them to Professor Rudolf Virchow at Berlin for investigation. (See Appendix II.) Nearly all the pottery is lustrous black; but lustrous red, brown, or yellow terra-cottas are not rare. I collected separately all the more characteristic fragments, particularly all the vase-rims with long horizontal tubular holes, of which I gathered hundreds, and put carefully aside those with an incised ornamentation, which is always filled with chalk in order to strike the eye. This ornamentation is always more or less like that which we see on the fragments represented in Ilios, p. 216, Nos.