Daily life in Vani during the Colchian period

A grounded look at a Colchian hill settlement in western Georgia, where timber buildings, ritual spaces, goldwork, farming, storage jars, and Black Sea contacts shaped daily routines.

Vani stood in southern Imereti in western Georgia, on a hill overlooking the Sulori valley near the Rioni basin and about 40 kilometers south-west of modern Kutaisi. Archaeologists divide its first-millennium-BCE occupation into four broad phases, from sparse 8th- and 7th-century material to the settlement's destruction in the mid-1st century BCE. Across that long span, timber-and-clay construction gave way to stone architecture; rich graves and imported pottery appeared; and the later hilltop acquired walls, gates, sanctuaries and workshops.[1][2][6]

The ancient name of the site remains unknown. Its function is also debated: “city-sanctuary” or “temple-city” expresses one influential interpretation of later Vani, not a securely attested ancient status. Nor do gold-filled graves and sacred buildings describe most residents. The evidence is much better at showing elite display, ritual and specialized production than the size, composition or routines of ordinary households.[2][3]

Evidence, Chronology, and Scope

“The Colchian period” here covers roughly seven centuries, not a single social world. In the earliest phase, about the 8th to early 6th centuries BCE, finds are scarce and include local pottery and baked clay with wattle impressions. From the late 7th or 6th century to the mid-4th century, large local storage vessels, imported Greek ceramics and exceptionally rich graves indicate growing wealth and external contacts. Stone construction and changing burial and pottery traditions mark the mid-4th to mid-3rd centuries; the 3rd to mid-1st centuries saw the best-preserved fortifications, sanctuaries and evidence for bronze working.[1][3]

Most evidence consists of buildings, pottery, graves, metalwork and ritual deposits. These survive unevenly and overrepresent durable objects and people buried with wealth. A grave assemblage records a deliberately staged funeral, not the deceased's everyday wardrobe or diet; a transport amphora identifies a container and route more readily than its final contents or owner. The Eastern Vani Survey further found dispersed occupation around the hill, with several places serving as communal or elite focal points. Vani should therefore be read as one prominent center within an inhabited landscape, not as an isolated hilltop containing the whole community.[4][5]

Housing and Living Spaces

Early construction at Vani used wood and clay. Baked daub bearing wattle impressions shows walls made around woven branches, while excavators describe timber buildings in the earlier levels. The evidence does not preserve a standard house plan, however, and it cannot justify filling every room with an assumed set of beds, benches or textile equipment. Large locally made jars demonstrate storage, but their contents and whether they belonged to households, elite stores or ritual facilities must be judged context by context.[1][3]

The hill's terraces, steep edges and ravines constrained movement and building. Stone architecture first became prominent after the mid-4th century BCE; in the later Hellenistic phase, walls, towers and gates controlled access while cult buildings and work areas occupied parts of the site. These are not straightforward domestic remains. They show that labor and supplies had to move through a defended and increasingly monumental center, but they leave open where most workers and their families slept.[2][3]

Survey east of Vani supplies part of the missing landscape. Settlement was dispersed rather than concentrated in a single dense town, and Classical and Hellenistic pottery increased at sites around the center. Farming, herding, timber cutting and movement between slopes, fields and the hilltop would have linked these communities, although surface pottery cannot reveal a household's legal dependence on Vani or the precise route taken each day. The combination of hilltop storage, ritual and craft facilities with scattered occupation is therefore more secure than a single reconstructed “Vani house”.[4]

Food and Daily Meals

Vani does not yet provide a secure menu for all phases or social groups. Large storage jars, local tableware, Greek transport amphorae and vessels placed in graves show storing, serving, drinking and long-distance supply, but do not by themselves identify every food involved. Imported pottery changed over time: Chian, Lesbian, Thasian and Attic wares occur in the earlier elite horizon, while connections with Sinope and other Black Sea centers became more visible later. These objects reveal selective access to foreign goods rather than a Greek diet shared by the population.[3][8]

The firmest Vani-specific environmental evidence belongs near the end of the site's history. Pollen and organic residues from a hoard deposited in the mid-1st century BCE support cattle-raising, agriculture, viticulture and horticulture in the surrounding landscape. Residue in one repeatedly used bronze lamp was identified as flax oil. The study does not provide meal proportions, recipes or a list of cereals, and its late date should not be projected unchanged into the 6th century BCE.[6]

That caution matters because an apparent Iron Age millet grain from Vani was directly radiocarbon-dated to about 400 CE and identified as intrusive. Millet was cultivated elsewhere in the Caucasus long before Vani flourished, but this particular grain cannot establish its consumption at Colchian-period Vani. Wine has a stronger local case: drinking vessels and amphorae occur in graves and ritual deposits, and late pollen evidence indicates viticulture. Even so, funerary banqueting reveals an elite rite, not the frequency or quantity of wine in ordinary meals.[5][6][7]

Work and Labor

Agriculture and stock-raising sustained Vani and its hinterland, but the available evidence rarely identifies named occupations or allocates tasks by gender or legal status. The late pollen record securely indicates cattle, vines, cultivated plants and orchards; storage vessels and regional settlement add evidence for producing and managing supplies. Sowing, tending animals, harvesting, carrying and maintenance were necessarily seasonal, yet no Vani account records a worker's timetable, wage or obligation.[4][6]

Metalworking is unusually tangible. Excavators found a goldsmith's work area with tools, unfinished ornaments, slag and charred wood; finished diadems, pendants and appliqués display filigree, granulation and other demanding techniques. In the late Hellenistic bronze hoard, large pieces of beeswax are consistent with local lost-wax casting, while fragments of monumental bronze sculpture and workshop evidence place casting at Vani rather than merely somewhere in Colchis.[3][6]

Pottery also connected everyday handling to wider exchange. Local black-polished wares and large jars coexisted with imported drinking vessels and transport amphorae. Colchian amphora production began around the mid-4th century BCE under strong Sinopean influence and occurred at several centers; amphora fragments at Vani therefore show participation in a regional system, not automatically a potter's workshop on the hill. Building fortifications, maintaining sacred spaces and moving bulky jars and fuel up the terraces required organized labor, but proposed lists of priests, porters, musicians or administrators go beyond the surviving records.[3][8]

Social Structure

Vani's graves demonstrate marked inequality, but they illuminate a narrow and deliberately displayed part of society. Grave 11, about 450 BCE, held four people in a wooden structure and a horse outside it; one woman wore substantially richer jewelry than the others. Grave 6, dated 400–350 BCE, contained a young woman with local goldwork, a Persian-made pectoral altered in Colchis and probable Rhodian glass. These finds show that some women held or inherited high status, not what work women as a whole performed.[5]

Other graves expose coercion as well as wealth. The warrior in Grave 9 (about 350–325 BCE) was interred with two people interpreted as sacrificed retainers and a dog; Grave 24 (about 350–300 BCE) included four such attendants and a horse. A richly furnished grave of a three- or four-year-old girl, dated about 300–250 BCE, shows that rank could attach to family and age rather than personal achievement. It remains difficult to recover the legal status or life histories of the accompanying dead, so “servant”, “retainer” and “enslaved person” should not be treated as interchangeable certainties.[5]

A 4th-century signet ring bearing the name Dedatos in Greek letters is often associated with a high-status individual, sometimes called a ruler, but the title is not written on the object. More securely, imported vessels, seals, precious metal and monumental construction show elite access to distant networks and concentrated labor. They do not establish a complete hierarchy beneath that elite, and farmers, craftspeople, dependents and ritual personnel remain largely anonymous.[1][2]

Ritual became increasingly prominent in later Vani. Seven metal figurines dated about 300–200 BCE were carefully deposited in or near sacred structures; six were locally made, while an imported Greek bronze satyr was altered with Colchian gold ornaments and wrapped before burial. Such acts show selective adoption rather than simple “Hellenisation”. They also reveal ritual handling and craft work, although the figurines' precise function and the identities of the participants remain unknown.[5]

Tools and Technology

The best-attested technologies are ceramic storage and serving, timber-and-clay construction, later masonry, and metalworking. Large jars made accumulation possible, but assigning grain, wine, oil or seed to an untested vessel is unsafe. Wattle-marked daub preserves a building technique even where the wood has decayed. Later walls and tiled or stone elements represent a chronological change, not evidence that all residents moved into masonry houses.[1][3]

Gold ornaments demonstrate hammering, wirework, filigree and granulation; workshop debris connects at least some of that skill directly to Vani. Bronze casting demanded wax models, mould materials, controlled heat and finishing, and the surviving beeswax and casting evidence make this chain unusually visible in the last phase. By contrast, baskets, wooden utensils, ropes and most cloth have largely disappeared. Their probable use should not be mistaken for excavated inventories, while durable grave goods should not be mistaken for the balance of everyday possessions.[3][6]

Clothing and Materials

Ordinary clothing is poorly preserved. The site does not support a fixed list of tunics, cloaks, footwear or fibers for every phase, and jewelry cannot identify the daily dress of farmers or craftspeople. Cloth impressions and traces in exceptional deposits show that textiles existed, while ornaments indicate adornment; most washing, mending and reuse remains archaeologically elusive.[3][5]

Elite funerals preserve a sharply different record. Diadems with hanging temple ornaments, necklaces, bracelets, rings and gold appliqués were arranged on bodies and shrouds; Grave 24 also contained thousands of colored beads. The small metal ritual figures were themselves fitted with miniature gold jewelry and wrapped in cloth. These contexts show how dress and wrapping helped express rank and ritual transformation. They do not prove that the same combinations were worn in life, and differences among the graves caution against defining one “Colchian costume”.[3][5]

Daily life around Vani joined agriculture and stock-raising in a dispersed hinterland to storage, construction, specialized metalwork, ritual and exchange at the hilltop center. Its remains are richest for elite funerals and the monumental late phases, so ordinary routines cannot be narrated with equal detail. What survives securely is a changing material system: timber and clay before widespread stone construction, local vessels beside imported wares, agricultural products and livestock supporting concentrated display, and Colchian techniques adapting objects and ideas that arrived through Black Sea and inland networks.

References

Lordkipanidze, Otar. “Vani: An Ancient City of Colchis.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 32, no. 2 (1991): 151–195. Publication record
Braund, David. Georgia in Antiquity: A History of Colchis and Transcaucasian Iberia, 550 BC–AD 562. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, especially pp. 122–151. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198144731.001.0001
Kacharava, Darejan, and Guram Kvirkvelia. Wine, Worship, and Sacrifice: The Golden Graves of Ancient Vani. Edited by Jennifer Y. Chi. Princeton: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and Princeton University Press, 2008. Catalogue record and preview
Hughes, Ryan C. The Archaeology of a Colchian Landscape: Results of the Eastern Vani Survey. PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2015. University of Michigan repository record and dissertation
J. Paul Getty Museum. “The Golden Graves of Ancient Vani.” Exhibition resource, 2009. Grave and ritual-figurine records
Chichinadze, Maia, and Eliso Kvavadze. “Pollen and Non-pollen Palynomorphs in Organic Residue from the Hoard of Ancient Vani (Western Georgia).” Journal of Archaeological Science 40, no. 5 (2013): 2237–2253. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2012.12.036
Martin, Lucie, Erwan Messager, Giorgi Bedianashvili, et al. “The Place of Millet in Food Globalization during Late Prehistory as Evidenced by New Bioarchaeological Data from the Caucasus.” Scientific Reports 11 (2021): 13124. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-92392-9
Tsetskhladze, G. R., and S. Y. Vnukov. “Colchian Amphorae: Typology, Chronology, and Aspects of Production.” Annual of the British School at Athens 87 (1992): 357–386. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068245400015215