Reconsidering the role of Thorikos within the Laurion silver mining area (Attica, Greece) through hydrological analyses

Through the region-wide hydrological and archaeological analysis, it could be shown that the Thorikos workshops contrast sharply with the Soureza ones. The latter relied on ephemeral streams which were consolidated and tapped by large cisterns, thus creating a water stock that was more than sufficient to bridge the dry periods of the year. The former relied on the harvesting of limited runoff during heavy rain events, which in many cases did not provide a sufficient water stock. Furthermore, water supply strategies in Thorikos were not as well-considered in comparison to Soureza. This leads to the conclusion that Thorikos could have never been the large scale processing site Soureza was and, when combined with the small-scale analysis, the site must have had a distinctively more ad hoc character.