Roman Pottery Research Articles

An archaeological and archaeometric study of Late Punic–Roman Pottery from the Tas-Silġ Sanctuary and the Żejtun Villa, Malta

Abstract This interdisciplinary study contributes to the understanding of the use of raw materials and pottery production techniques in Late Punic–Late Republican Malta, focusing on the Tas-Silġ sanctuary and the Żejtun Villa. Plates, bowls and cooking vessels were described typologically, and their fabrics were characterised using polarised light microscopy and Energy Dispersive X-Ray Fluorescence. The aims were to classify these vessels into integrated and coherent fabric groups based on all analyses, to better understand the local production of vessels and to assess a possible local provenance. Four integrated fabric groups were identified and represent local productions using distinct raw materials or production techniques. These groups can be distinguished typologically, macroscopically, petrographically and chemically. Multivariate techniques, including the chemical analysis of Maltese clays, were produced to enhance the fabric classification and discuss their raw materials. The raw materials identified are consistent with what is known in Maltese geology. One group is distinctive, and the results suggest the possible use of a previously unidentified raw material, Terra Rossa, found over the Upper Coralline Limestone. This new classification provides the basis for further studies of Late Punic–Roman sites in the Maltese islands and the future identification of imports and exports from the Maltese islands.

Tsunami deposits in Tunisia contemporaneous of the large 365 CE Crete earthquake and Mediterranean Sea catastrophic event

New field investigations along the East Tunisian coastline reveal sedimentary deposits and damaged localities that may account for a catastrophic event during the late Holocene. North of Sfax city, ~ 3.4 m high cliff coastal marine and alluvial terraces show 20 to 50-cm-thick chaotic layer with sandy coarse gravels mixed with reworked pebbles, broken shells of gastropods and molluscs, organic matter and Roman pottery. The chaotic layer truncates sandy-silty paleosol, covers Roman settlements and is overlain by fire remains, a thin sandy-silty aeolian unit and ~ 1-m-thick alluvial deposits. Charcoal samples collected at 10 cm below and 4 cm above the catastrophic deposits provide radiocarbon dating that brackets the catastrophic unit between 286 and 370 CE. Other historical investigations on the Roman sites of Neapolis (Nabeul), Hadrumete (Sousse), Thyna (Sfax), Meninx in Girba (Djerba), Wadi Ennouili (Gulf of Gabes), and Sabratha (in Libya) evidenced major damage and abandonment of sites in the fourth century (16, 41, 42, 43, 44). The new identification of catastrophic deposits, offshore-onshore correlations with turbidites and modelling of tsunami waves suggest the relationship with the 21 July 365 tsunamigenic earthquake (Mw ~ 8) of west Crete (Greece) and call for a better estimate of tsunami risk on the Mediterranean coastlines.

A Multi-Analytical Study of the Archaeometric Aspects and Restoration of Some Ancient Roman Pottery Artifacts in Sinai, Egypt

A Multi-Analytical Study of the Archaeometric Aspects and Restoration of Some Ancient Roman Pottery Artifacts in Sinai, Egypt

Roman amphorae discovered at Romula in the archaeological campaign of 2018

The article presents a lot of Roman amphorae, discovered at Romula, in the excavations from 2018. All presented amphorae were found in the central area of the former Roman city, so-called Central Fort. The amphorae represent an important number of all Roman pottery vessel discovered in 2018. They were found in all research units, and, in all archaeological levels. Almost all of them are certainly arrived at Romula from other Roman provinces as a part of a commercial exchanges. The study of them indicate an Oriental origins of this kind of vessel. Some of them were used specially for wine transport, other ones were used for more type of goods as olive oil, wine salted fish or fish sauce. The large number of this kind of vessels indicate a wealth category of people that could buy them that were more expensive that those of local origins.

Analysing Roman pottery workshops in the Civitas Viromanduorum (France, Picardy)

Pottery kilns in the Vermandois territory were discovered in the north of the Roman province Gallia Belgica (covering present-day Picardy in northern France) during various excavation campaigns, conducted from the end of the 19th century until 2020. Archaeologists from the French Institut National de Recherches Archéologiques Préventives (INRAP) excavated 28 pottery kilns from the Roman period, dated between the Tiberian period (14–37 AD) and the beginning of the 4th century AD. These were located in three main areas: Muille-Villette, Montescourt-Lizerolles, Vermand, and Saint-Quentin. Several others were excavated overlying earlier kilns and craft production at Beuvraignes and near Noyon. The pottery waste included fine ware (terra nigra, micaceous tableware), coarse ware (dishes, jars, pots, dolia, flagons, bottles) amphorae and pipes. During the archaeological operations, we systematically questioned our excavation methods according to the preservation of the remains and aimed for an exhaustive study of the ceramics. Building upon the excavation data, this study examined the pottery waste from the workshops at Muille-Villette, Montescourt-Lizerolles, and Saint-Quentin compositionally, adopting archaeometric analysis (OM and WD-XRF) to reconstruct the production technology, and using archaeomagnetic analysis to date the kiln structures. The results offer a first insight into the pottery craft in the Vermandois area, including specific features and technological traditions of the potters, as well as the specialisation of ceramic production and distribution.

Trade Networks in the Neighbouring Roman Provinces of Aquitania-Tarraconensis on the Bay of Biscay: Evidence from Petrographic and Chemical Analyses of Common Coarse Ware Pottery

Common non-wheel-thrown Roman pottery from the southern Aquitania and north-eastern of Tarraconensis provinces (CNT-AQTA) of the Early and Later Roman Empire (1st to 5th centuries AD) has been studied. Petrological, mineralogical, and chemical analyses were conducted to contrast with the archaeological study of the pottery. The chemical composition of many pottery samples displays different patterns of burial chemical modification, limiting their use for provenance and diffusion studies. Particular emphasis has been paid to the petrographic features of the fabrics, as they do not change during burial, reflecting the nature of the raw material and making it possible to identify the provenance areas of the raw materials. Around the Bay of Biscay, the same pottery tradition continued in the neighbouring provinces during Roman times. Petrographic studies make it possible to determine the distribution of pottery and the changes in trade networks during the Roman period across the area of the Bay of Biscay being studied.

The Impact of Transportation on Pottery Industries in Roman Britain

Abstract The distribution of Roman pottery depended on the transportation system which moved it. Here we trace developments in these distributions during the Roman period in Britain to document how the transportation system developed and assess its impact on the island’s economy. We created a database with records from 775 excavations at 652 sites, and data on over two million pottery sherds. By analyzing the changing distributions of pottery from production centers, we are able to measure improvements in the Roman transportation system over time. These improvements seem to have been most rapid soon after conquest, with transport costs almost halving in the first century of Roman occupation. As the road network expanded and transportation technology improved and pottery gained access to wider markets, producers’ dominance over their local markets declined as rival products became more accessible, and certain industries dramatically increased their outputs. Production by small industries fell in our Middle and Later Roman periods.

Hellenistic and Roman fine wares from ancient Elis, Greece: Α preliminary technological study using SEM/EDS analysis

This paper focuses on the archaeometric analysis of a pottery assemblage from the West Stoa (the so-called Stoa of the Hellanodikai) in ancient Elis, Greece. The Stoa was in use from the Archaic to the Roman times. Between the 6th and the 4th century BC, it served as the seat of the officials (the Hellanodikai) who oversaw the Olympic Games. Excavations revealed rich findings, such as fragments of glass and metal objects, murex shells, pottery fragments and a plethora of animal bones. The assemblage under examination consists of sixty-one (61) black slipped, red slipped and terra sigillata drinking pots and other forms of table wares, dated between the 3rd and the late 1st century BC. All samples were first classified based on their typological traits and then examined both macroscopically and microscopically. Based on their visual traits, five fabric groups were determined and 44 samples, representative of each fabric group, were selected for further chemical examination. SEM/EDS was used to characterize chemically and technologically the fabric groups. The combined use of LED and SEM/EDS revealed that the majority of the vessels presents a hard, non-porous, calcareous clay fabric (CaO > 10 wt%), which led to the production of high quality, durable vessels. In general, the fabrics and the chemical groups are not correlated, with the exception of the terra sigillata samples which present homogeneity, both microscopical and chemical. The examination of the microstructure showed that the pots were fired at a temperature between 850 and 1050 °C, which is typical for Hellenistic and Roman pottery production. The homogeneity and the thickness of the slip in most of the samples are indications of its high quality. Overall, the current combined typological and analytical study of a pottery assemblage from a recently excavated archaeological site significantly contributes to the acquisition of new data about western Peloponnesian pottery fabrics.

Focusing on red and black engobes in Roman pottery from Cumae (southern Italy): Pompeian Red Ware and Graue Platten ceramic productions

This short paper provides additional details to a recent minero-petrographic investigation on local and exotic ceramic artefacts collected from the Forum of Cumae and particularly about the composition of the ceramic slips of locally produced Pompeian Red Ware (PRW) and the imported pottery known as Graue Platten (GP). These pottery fragments were characterised via non-destructive techniques (portable XRF and Raman spectroscopy), the results of which have been validated with micro-destructive X-ray diffraction, and conventional electron and optical microscopy techniques.As a whole, the internal red slip of PRW samples should be made using a slurry of a levigated, iron-rich clay material (i.e., ochre) suspended in water and then fired in oxidizing atmosphere in order to obtain the typical red hue. Clear differences in the technological manufacturing between the older (dated from the 1st century BCE to the early 1st century CE) and later (from the 1st to the 4th centuries CE) PRW ceramic productions have been highlighted.The dark colour of the ceramic slip in fragments of Graue Platten (dated between the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE) seems to be conferred by the occurrence of carbon black material, detected via Raman spectroscopy and EDS spectrometry. Probably, presence of carbon black could be due to the thermal decomposition, in absence of oxygen (pyrolysis), of colloidal organic matter.This investigation sheds new light on production technologies of engobes of these ancient Roman ceramic productions, although further investigations are required to infer the provenance of clayey materials used for the manufacturing of PRW coating in archaeological workshops of the Campania region.

Archaeology and History: A Late Antiquity for Britain

Archaeology and History: A Late Antiquity for Britain

Unsupervised clustering of Roman potsherds via Variational Autoencoders

In this paper we propose an artificial intelligence imaging solution to support archaeologists in the classification task of Roman commonware potsherds. Usually, each potsherd is represented by its sectional profile as a two dimensional black–white image and printed in archaeological books related to specific archaeological excavations. The partiality and handcrafted variance of the fragments make their matching a challenging problem: we propose to pair similar profiles via the unsupervised hierarchical clustering of non-linear features learned in the latent space of a deep convolutional Variational Autoencoder (VAE) network. Our contribution also include the creation of a ROman COmmonware POTtery (ROCOPOT) database, with more than 4000 potsherds profiles extracted from 25 Roman pottery corpora, and a MATLAB GUI software for the easy inspection of shape similarities. Results are commented both from a mathematical and archaeological perspective so as to unlock new research directions in both communities.

"A powerful supervised fuzzy method. Characterization, authentication and traceability of roman pottery "

"A powerful supervised fuzzy method. Characterization, authentication and traceability of roman pottery "

Minero-petrographic investigation on Roman pottery found in a dump in the workshop area of Cumae (southern Italy)

The focus of this work is the archaeometric investigation of ceramic wasters found in a dump in the workshop area of Cumae that are mostly represented by important production indicators of pottery produced in the Augustean-Tiberian period. The fragments belong to different ceramic classes and productions, such as: pompeian red ware, common cookwares, parts of kiln vault, thin-walled pottery, terra sigillata, large container, bar, and graue Platten. Provenance of the raw materials used for each ceramic class and processing techniques were assessed via a multi-analytical minero-petrographic approach, which includes polarised light microscopy with modal analysis, chemical analysis (XRF), mineralogical analysis (XRPD), microstructural observation via SEM and SEM-EDS for microchemical analysis. All cookwares show different levels of firing and contains non-local temper from the Somma-Vesuvius area, marked by leucite-bearing scoriae and garnet. The geochemical comparisons with clays from the region allowed for definition of the likely clay raw materials sources, in particular for terra sigillata. Most of the samples were locally produced, except for a specimen of graue Platten which, on the contrary, is an exotic sample.

Using parasite analysis to identify ancient chamber pots: An example of the fifth century CE from Gerace, Sicily, Italy

Chamber pots are perhaps one of the more challenging ceramic forms to identify with certainty in Roman pottery studies, despite the availability of detailed ceramic typologies. Here, we describe the analysis of mineralized concretions taken from a Sicilian ceramic vessel of the fifth-century CE, and propose paleoparasitology, the identification of intestinal parasites, as a helpful method for contributing to the detection of chamber pots. Microscope analysis of the mineralized concretions revealed the presence of eggs of the intestinal nematode Trichuris trichiura (whipworm), confirming that the vessel originally contained faeces. This is the first time that parasite eggs have been identified from concretions inside a Roman ceramic vessel. Systematic parasitological investigation of calcified deposits from ceramic vessels may therefore help to establish function. In addition, the identification of intestinal parasite eggs has the potential to advance our understanding of the sanitation, diet, and intestinal health of populations who used these chamber pots.

The early Roman pottery kilns in the ager Rusellanus (southern Tuscany, Italy) and their products

This archaeometric research examined the structural elements of the three kilns found in the plain below the archaeological site ofRusellae, the ceramics found within this artisans’ quarter and the clayey materials on which the workshops were built. Twenty-one samples were investigated by bulk chemical and mineralogical analyses (ICP-MS, ICP-AES and XRD) and mineralogical-petrographic analyses on thin sections (optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy). The results allowed the characterisation of the production group to be obtained. Both carbonatic and non-carbonatic clayey materials were used to make common-ware ceramics and, above all, building materials such as bricks and tiles. The production technology varied from accurately to poorly worked pastes, fired from low (about 800 °C) to very high temperatures (above 1100 °C). The compositional comparison with data previously obtained on stamped bricks and neighbouring clayey materials suggested a correlation with the producer/s known by the stampsSEX CLEMENT/PROBIandPROBI. Furthermore, the variety of raw materials used in the manufacture and product diversification also let speculate that the production site welcomed various artisans and products for the final firing.

تصوير بعض المشاهد الأسطورية على الفخار الروماني المتأخر "دراسة لشقف غير منشورة بمتحف الآثار التعليمي بكلية الآداب-جامعة الإسكندرية" Representation of Some Mythological Scenes on Late Roman Pottery “A Study of Unpublished Sherds in the Educational Museum of the Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University”

تصوير بعض المشاهد الأسطورية على الفخار الروماني المتأخر "دراسة لشقف غير منشورة بمتحف الآثار التعليمي بكلية الآداب-جامعة الإسكندرية" Representation of Some Mythological Scenes on Late Roman Pottery “A Study of Unpublished Sherds in the Educational Museum of the Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University”

Adding to John W. Hayes`s Late Roman Pottery. Late Roman Light-Colored Wares with champlevé decoration from Histria revisited

Adding to John W. Hayes`s Late Roman Pottery. Late Roman Light-Colored Wares with champlevé decoration from Histria revisited

Introduction: "Roman Pottery in the Near East: Where, Whence, Whither?" Second Round Table, Amman, 2014. In memoriam S. Thomas Parker (1950–2021)

The initial idea for this kind of workshop on “Roman Pottery in the Near East” went back to the conference on Archaeology and Archaeometry in Parma and Pisa in 2008. We became very enthusiastic about the idea to initialise our own series of pottery workshops in which we would strive to connect scholars and researchers currently working on pottery from the Roman period in the Near East, mainly Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel, hoping to establish an academic network that would provide a platform for discussions for researchers of all levels that might transcend political differences. The 2014 round table in Amman focused on the large number of ceramic research projects from Transjordan and the Nabataean/Roman pottery studies from Middle and Southern Transjordan. The hottest discussion concerns established typo-chronology of Nabataean fine ware in the Petra region, an issue which is crucial for future pottery research in the Nabataean territories. The chronology is questioned by Tali-Erickson, to which Wenner provides a response. The presentation of eight papers from the round-table is dedicated to S. Thomas Parker, who supported the vision wholeheartedly and was an active participant and discussant in the workshops.

Roman pottery from the Building C4 pantry in the Qasr al-Bint area of Petra

The remains of a Nabataean private complex located west of the Roman-period apsidal building in the Qasr al-Bint area of Petra, excavated by the French archaeological team between 2005 and 2008, turned out to be reused by squatters during the Roman period. This occupation phase, one of the latest in this complex, was of a domestic nature, characterized by the installation of ovens (tawabeen) and other fireplaces, as well as the installation of a channel in the courtyard. The large assemblage of well preserved, often complete pottery vessels from the corresponding levels was dated by coins and Nabataean pottery, supported by radiocarbon datings, to the second half of the 2nd and the early 3rd century CE. Consequently, the group offers the opportunity to study a homogeneous corpus of ceramic material from a period that is not at all well documented in Petra. The repertoire includes all kinds of vessels, especially cooking pots, small storage jars and drinking vessels. In addition, a set of multi-nozzled lamps was associated with this group.

Old lamps in a new province: Loeschcke type I lighting devices in Roman Dacia

Loeschcke type I volute lamps were the first mass‑produced Roman pottery lamps, their appealing shape and unmistakable triangular nozzle along with their rich decoration ensured that they were just as easily recognizable for Roman period consumers, as they are for nowadays specialists. In Italy their production started in the mid-1st century BC and mostly ended by the late 1st century AD, being pushed out of the market by the cheaper and more practical Firmalampen developed in northern Italy. Even so, type I lamps were used in Dacia, a province founded in a period when these lamps ceased to be produced in Italy. The present study brings into discussion a number of 54 pieces, coming from various sites of the province, mainly Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa as well as from several auxiliary forts. While the archaeological data is scarce and no fabrics analyses could be carried out, the present paper sets out to explore different possibilities with regard to this apparent chronological anomaly. The investigation is based on the patterns of distribution of these lamps in the province, as well as their proportion within the local lamp finds against the backdrop of the chronological evolution of production in Italy and the provinces.