Once upon a Time in the East

Trends in the production of olive oil amphorae at ceramic workshops in Roman Baetica: a chrono-proportional representation method

“…First, although previous diachronic distribution modelling has incorporated material from both excavated and surface contexts (e.g. Willet 2014;Bes 2015), the size of assemblages recovered by limited excavations of small workshops is insufficient and potentially unrepresentative of those sites' full production histories. Hence, unless a workshop is completely excavated, yielding all discarded amphora waster sherds, the data should comprise surface finds only.…”

“…Studies of other types of ceramic wares, such as Eastern Sigillata A (Willet 2014: 60), appear to confirm that quantitative research cannot hope to extend beyond a general sampling of each urban centre; moreover, it is then impossible to aggregate all the amphora evidence from many urban sites to create a single dataset. Influential examples of the modelling of the temporal distribution of finewares recovered from consumption contexts, however, include the pioneering studies of African Red Slip (Fentress & Perkins 1988;Fentress et al 2004); such aoristic modelling has been refined using Gaussian and gamma distribution methods (Willet 2014) and applied to the study of Eastern Sigillata pottery within the framework of the ICRATES project (Bes 2015). The results of these studies document diachronic fluctuation in the volumes of finewares circulating in both urban and rural contexts, with potential relevance for the reconstruction of wider demographic and economic processes (Millett 1991;Bes & Poblome 2009).…”