Discussants:  Thomas Lappi (Freie Universität Berlin), Stephan Schmid (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Miltos was a highly prized iron oxide from Greco-Roman antiquity, with vast applications from the arts and crafts, to medicine, to the maintenance and upkeep of ships. The island of Kea off the south tip of Attica was particularly known for its miltos, boasting large resources of high-quality material. Kean miltos was so well regarded that in the fourth century BCE, the polis of Athens issued a decree declaring a monopoly on the material, and preventing the island from exporting this valuable resource to other city states. Geological survey, sampling, and analysis have confirmed that the miltos of Kea differed from other regional varieties in its unique composition of toxic trace elements in addition to the pigment’s ferric oxide base, which bestowed the pigment with rich and diverse cultural properties. However, while the island’s source deposits have been analysed, miltos is yet to be discovered in an archaeological context. This paper reports the discovery of miltos from a fifth century BCE shipyard in eastern Sicily, and presents the results of archeometric analysis on the material, exploring themes of maritime crafts, inter-island connectivity, and regional technologies in the ancient Mediterranean.