A Study of the Centuries-Long Reliance on Local Ceramics in Jerash Through Full Quantification and Simulation

Simon Carrignon,Tom Brughmans,Achim Lichtenberger,Iza Romanowska,Philip Bes,Line Egelund,Rubina Raja

doi:10.1007/s10816-021-09510-0

Abstract

The Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project revealed a robust and striking pattern of the extreme dominance (>99%) of locally produced ceramics over six centuries and across different depositional contexts (in total over half a million pottery sherds). The archaeology of Jerash points towards an exceptional degree of self-sufficiency in craft products: why? The project team implemented a full quantification approach during excavation, manually and digitally recording and counting all pottery and other classes of artefacts. This enabled a full analysis of trends in production and use of ceramics throughout the archaeologically documented history of Jerash and revealed the unexpected pattern of the extreme dominance of local pottery. Archaeologists formulated a set of hypotheses to explain this pattern, and we developed an agent-based model of simple customer preference driving product distribution to evaluate several explanatory factors and their potential interactions. Our simulation results reveal that preference for locally produced ceramics at Jerash might be a plausible theory, but only if its intrinsic value was considered rather high in comparison to other goods, or if it was preferred by a majority of the population, and there was a tendency to follow this majority preference (or a combination of these factors). Here, we present a complete research pipeline of a full quantification of ceramics, analysis and modelling applicable at any archaeological site. We argue that transparent methods are necessary at all stages of an archaeological project: not only for data collection, management and analysis but also in theory development and testing. By focusing on a common archaeological material and by leveraging a range of widely available computational tools, we are able to better understand local and intra-regional distribution patterns of craft products in Jerash and in the ancient eastern Mediterranean.

Highlights

The full quantification of ceramics from the Northwest Quarter in Jerash, ancient Gerasa (Jordan) (Fig. 1) reveals a striking pattern: over 625,000 sherds across diverse contexts show the dominance (>99%) of locally produced tableware, coarse ware and cooking ware
Neither did consumers have a strong tendency to buy a product, which was preferred by the least number of other consumers: i.e. assuming the local ceramics were preferred less than others because; for example, most consumers preferred imports; even a tendency towards buying that local product would not lead to it being consumed vastly more than other products
The proportions identified were surprising, because ceramics have never before been fully quantified at the site and because recovery biases in eastern Mediterranean Classical Archaeology tend to lead to the overrepresentation of imported ceramics

Summary

Introduction

The full quantification of ceramics from the Northwest Quarter in Jerash, ancient Gerasa (Jordan) (Fig. 1) reveals a striking pattern: over 625,000 sherds across diverse contexts show the dominance (>99%) of locally produced tableware, coarse ware and cooking ware. This pattern is evidenced from at least as early as the second century AD and throughout the history of the city as it was consecutively part of the Roman, Byzantine and Umayyad empires, until the mid-eighth century AD when it was hit by an earthquake leading to an occupation hiatus at the Northwest Quarter. The archaeology of Jerash points towards an exceptional degree of self-sufficiency in craft products: why?

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