Ancient Roman pottery

• 1. Introduction

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  Ancient Roman pottery is among the most studied and most abundant material evidence of any civilization in history. Walk across the city of Rome today and you can stand on top of a hill made almost entirely of broken pottery jars. Monte Testaccio, a mound near the banks of the Tiber, rises from millions of smashed amphorae, most of them once filled with Spanish olive oil. That oil lit the lamps of Rome, fed its kitchens, and cleaned its bathers. When the containers were empty, they were simply discarded, stacking up over generations into a landmark that still exists.

  What Monte Testaccio suggests is that Roman pottery was not precious. It was industrial. It was everywhere. It traveled from the workshops of southern Gaul to the markets of Scotland, from the province of Africa Proconsularis to the docks of Alexandria. Sherds from a single production site near the village of La Graufesenque have turned up in India and Sudan. The questions this documentary will pursue are: how did ordinary clay become such a global commodity, what did Romans actually use all this pottery for, and what can broken pieces still tell us more than a thousand years later?

• 2. Fine Wares and Terra Sigillata

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  Arretine ware, produced at Arezzo in Tuscany, was the prestige table pottery of the 1st century BC and the early 1st century AD. Its buff-to-pink fabric carried a naturally glossy surface slip that ranged from light orange to bright red. Potters competed to make it, and the names of many workshop owners survive because they stamped their products. Cnaius Ateius was one of the most prominent producers at Arezzo, but modern clay analysis has shown that vessels bearing his stamp were also made at Pisa and at branch workshops in Lyon and La Graufesenque in what is now France. His name was, in effect, a brand.

  Decoding a stamped piece of terra sigillata is more complex than it first appears. A factory stamp visible in a decorated area advertised the workshop name, while the individual bowl-maker signed plain vessels separately, and the mould-maker sometimes added a freehand signature that could appear on the finished piece as well. One decorated bowl could therefore carry three different names. African Red Slip ware, manufactured in the province of Africa Proconsularis in roughly modern Tunisia, outlasted Italian and Gaulish sigillata by centuries, continuing through to the Islamic conquest of North Africa. Occasional imports of African Red Slip have even been found in Britain dating to the 5th and 6th centuries.

• 3. The Amphora Trade

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  Heinrich Dressel, a German scholar working at the end of the 1800s, uncovered an exceptional deposit of amphorae in Rome at Castro Pretorio. From nearly 200 inscriptions on those containers he built the first systematic classification of amphora types, a reference still called the Dressel table. His work opened the study of what had been, for centuries, one of the Roman world's most important logistical objects.

  Amphorae were engineered for a purpose. Their spiked or pointed bases were not a design quirk; the spike functioned as a third handle when tilting the container to empty it, and it allowed stable stacking in a ship's hold. A vessel had to be strong enough to survive a sea voyage, light enough to handle at the destination, and shaped to pack efficiently below decks. Calculations based on those constraints show that a ship could hold approximately 4,500 examples of the early Dressel 1 type, but around 6,000 of the later, thinner-walled Dressel 2-4, because the newer form used the same cargo space more efficiently.

  The geography of amphora production tracks the geography of Roman trade itself. Spanish producers in Hispania Baetica and Hispania Tarraconensis dominated Mediterranean markets between the 2nd and the 1st century BC, helped partly by land grants to military veterans and the founding of new colonies. The Dressel 20 olive oil amphora, the Dressel 7-13 for fish sauce, and the Haltern 70 for fruit sauce all came from the Baetica. Wine amphorae from the island of Rhodes were popular from the 3rd century BC, and their tradition evolved into a type called the Camulodunum 184, which carried Rhodian wine across the empire. By the late Roman period, North African types such as the African I and II, used from the 2nd through the late 4th century AD, came to dominate production across the western Mediterranean.

• 4. Cooking, Mortaria, and Coarse Wares

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  From Britain to Egypt, from Spain to Syria, local pre-Roman pottery traditions for cooking survived the arrival of Roman rule largely intact. Earthenware bowls, pans, casseroles, and jars were inexpensive and practical, and regional kilns saw no reason to change what worked. The black-burnished ware of south-west England is a case in point: first made in the late Iron Age before the Roman conquest, it continued to be produced throughout the Roman period and was actually marketed more widely under Roman influence than it had been before.

  One vessel type, however, spread specifically because of Roman culture: the mortarium. This was a robust, shallow bowl with a thick outward-curving rim for easy gripping, often a pouring lip, and an interior surface roughened with embedded grit or coarse sand. Used with a pestle, it pureed and pulverized the herbs and spices central to Roman cooking. Mortaria were being imported from Gaulish sources into Britain more than a generation before Britain officially became a Roman province in AD 43. The scholar Paul Tyers has documented mortaria from no fewer than 16 different manufacturing sources, both Romano-British and Continental, found on sites across Britain alone.

  Other coarse wares served equally specialized needs. Small ceramic cheese-presses survive from Roman Britain. Ceramic pipes carried water and drained waste across cities and estates. The line between coarse and fine pottery was not always firm. Some provincial products served as tableware in one household and a storage vessel in another. What all coarse wares shared was a reliance on local production: unlike the fine wares traded across provincial boundaries, coarse pottery was usually made and bought in the same region.

• 5. Lamps and Terracotta Figurines

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  Artificial lighting was ordinary in the Roman world, and fired clay was the material that made it cheap. Metal lamps existed and could be elaborate objects with multiple nozzles and attached statuettes, but the standard Roman lamp was a small, mould-made clay object with a single nozzle and a central discus roughly 4-6 cm in diameter. That discus was a canvas: the decoration could show pagan deities, gladiatorial combat, chariot races, erotic scenes, hunting, everyday life, and, in the late Roman period, Christian symbols.

  One lamp-maker named Fortis became well-known enough that his products were copied outside his own Italian workshop, whether by independent imitators or perhaps by branch factories he operated himself. A Gaulish Firmalampe found in London, now documented, bears the name Atimetus stamped on its base. Firmalampen were particularly common in the military zones of the north-western provinces during the 2nd century AD. Roman lamps are, for archaeologists, useful dating tools precisely because their shapes, makers' marks, and decoration changed in trackable ways over time.

  Terracotta figurines followed a different logic. In Gaul and Germany, where no Iron Age tradition of making clay figures existed, new industries developed under Roman influence producing mould-made figures in fine white pipeclay. Subjects were predominantly religious: gods, goddesses, and animals associated with specific deities. A Celtic mother-goddess nursing one or two infants became one of the most popular types in central Gaul. These seated figures are shown in high-backed basketwork chairs identified as characteristic of Gaul and Britain. Figurines from the Allier Valley and the Rhineland industry at Cologne sometimes carry the signatures of the modellers or mould-makers who made them, a parallel to the practice seen in the samian industries of the same region.

• 6. Bricks, Tiles, and Campana Reliefs

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  Roman architectural ceramics were a separate industry from pottery, though they came from the same kilns and the same fired clay. Roman bricks used in wall construction were relatively thin and flat, often described as tile-like, and made in standardized sizes typically related to the Roman foot of approximately 11 inches, ranging from around 20 cm to about 58 cm square and roughly 5-7 cm thick. Because finished brick walls were plastered or rendered on both sides, the bricks themselves were never meant to be seen.

  Roof tiles followed two interlocking shapes. The tegula was a large, nearly square tile with upturned flanges along its longer edges. The imbrex was a half-cylindrical tile, slightly tapered so that adjacent pieces locked together. Laid over the raised flanges of the tegulae, the imbrices created the ridged roofline still recognizable on buildings in Italy and southern France today. This system required a roof pitch of no more than about 30 degrees. Military tileries produced tiles stamped with the number and symbol of the relevant legion, giving archaeologists a precise tool for tracking troop movements and construction dates.

  A more specialized product called Campana reliefs occupied the intersection of architecture and art. These terracotta plaques, typically between 22 and 50 cm high and 27 to 48 cm wide, carried figurative scenes drawn from mythology and were set into walls in bands or friezes. They were developed from about 50 BC and used almost entirely in the region between Tuscany and Campania, territories that had once belonged to Etruscan culture, of which the reliefs appear to be a continuation. They appeared first on small temples and later on a wider range of public and private buildings, before disappearing from the record after the middle of the 2nd century, outcompeted by moulded stucco and wall painting. The plaques take their name from Giampietro Campana, the 19th-century Italian scholar and collector who first studied them systematically.