Despite many years of research at the site, the Roman fort at Cape Aj-Todor near Yalta remains rela- tively poorly studied. A  better understanding of the discoveries made at the site can be reached by comparing them with the results of the excavations conducted in another fort also located in Crimea – at BalaklavaKadykovka. This text is an attempt at gathering together all the published information about the discoveries made at Cape Aj-Todor. The comparison of the research results from both sites has enabled establishing numerous similarities between them. Both forts functioned simultaneously, and their architectural remains can be qualified to identically dated phases. The final effect of the analysis undertaken by the author is a more complete plan of the fort at Cape Aj-Todor along with its surroundings, processed in a new graphic formula.

The Roman fort of Apsaros in Gonio (Adjara, Georgia) still holds answers to many issues connected with the Roman military presence on the Chorokhi river in ancient Colchis. In 2014, a Polish team joined the Georgian expedition to carry out excavation in two sectors diretly east of the centrally located principia. The sites were chosen based on a study of the results of geophysical prospection carried out in 2012. Two phases, dated to the early and late Roman periods respectively, were recorded. The early Roman architecture was interpreted as part of the installations and structures of a large bathhouse (balneae), including a mosaic floor in one of the rooms. The building was destroyed at least twice, most likely in a catastrophic fire. The article discusses the stratigraphy and the dating of the early Roman balneae based on glass artifacts and coins.

The article collects the modest evidence available on the use (and possible production) of ceramic building material by the Roman army in Colchis, using it as a backdrop for presenting the exceptional richness, in quantity as much as diversity, of the finds from Gonio/Apsaros. The signatures on these products add to the value of this assemblage. Part 1 of the article presents documented examples of stamps on bricks, roof tiles and ceramic pipes from the Gonio/Apsaros fort and links them to the construction projects of specific Roman army units in the Cappadocia province. The results of laboratory tests conducted on samples of ceramic products and raw clay from Gonio, presented in Part 2, distinguish between two reference groups for the production of which clay from near the fort was used. However, it has not been possible to indicate the specific deposits of such raw material used by the Roman army.

Archaeological discoveries made since 2014 at the site of the Roman fort in Apsaros/Gonio (Georgia) have shed more light on the earliest as well as later stages of the presence of the Roman army on the Colchis coast and on the history of the Apsaros fort itself. The paper reports on the new findings concerning the chronology of the Roman fort, and an essential part of the conclusions draws upon the results of numismatic research on recent coin finds from the site. Six years of fieldwork by a Polish-Georgian team have uncovered the remains of a possible horreum, built in the last decade of Nero’s reign, underlying a balneum constructed probably during Trajan’s Parthian war and rebuilt under Hadrian into a praetorium; a fine mosaic floor decorated with geometric motifs was found in one of the rooms of this early 2nd-century structure.

No abstract