The Production and Distribution of Pottery at Pompeii: A Review of the Evidence; Part 2, the Material Basis for Production and Distribution

Abstract

This study, in two parts, reviews the evidence from Pompeii for the production and distribution of pottery. Part 1 (AJA 113 [2009] 57-79) considers the production of pottery. Part 2, the present article, examines the ma terial basis for pottery production at Pompeii (i.e., the availability and use of the raw materials) and its distri bution. A consideration of the raw materials for pottery production available in the greater Pompeii region and the compositional characteristics of pottery from Pompeii permit some general observations about where these vessels were likely manufactured. While a large portion was probably produced at or near Pompeii, substantial numbers of vessels, including thin-walled wares, lamps, and amphoras, were probably manufactured elsewhere in the region. Non-amphora pottery was probably distrib uted to consumers at Pompeii by three methods: sale at the workshop, sale at a shop, and sale by a peddler. Some classes of non-amphora pottery imported from outside the region are abundant enough to suggest that they reached Pompeii via regularly functioning distribution mechanisms involving middleman merchants and/or the captains/crews of merchant ships. Other classes of imported non-amphora pottery that occur in only small quantities probably arrived via less regular mechanisms. Wine and fish products originating in the territory of Pompeii were probably packaged in amphoras at facilities located along the coast, and newly manufactured ampho ras were probably transported to these establishments for filling from production facilities elsewhere. Pompeii may well be anomalous for the large portion of its pottery that was manufactured beyond the immediate environs of the town.* * The information regarding the use of raw materials among traditional potters in Campania was collected by J. Theodore Pefia in the course of a grant held through the USIA Exchange Grant program while he was a member of the faculty of the University at Albany, SUNY. He undertook the neutron activation analysis (NAA) of the clays collected as part of this work while holding a postdoctoral fellowship in archaeological materials analysis at the Smithsonian Insti tution's Conservation Analytical Laboratory under the super vision of M.James Blackman and Pamela Vandiver, to whom he would like to express his appreciation for their support. He would also like to express his appreciation for generous assistance provided by the staff of the Map Library at the Uni versity of Michigan's Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, and the staff of the John Miller Burnam Classical Library at the University of Cincinnati. Myles McCallum would like to thank Christopher Parslow for providing unpublished photographs of a deposit of Sch?ne 6 table amphoras recovered in exca vations carried out under his direction at the Praedia Iuliae

Distinctive Volcanic Material for the Production of Campana A Ware: The Workshop Area of Neapolis at the Duomo Metro Station in Naples, Italy

“…The mixing of highly plastic calcareous clay from Ischia with a less plastic and noncalcareous WP could explain how ancient potters obtained a material of adequate plasticity and optimal technological requirement for such a standardized and widespread ceramic production. Indeed, the practice of mixing different clays to obtain a clay body with the desired technological features is assumed to have been often used in the past and is well documented in several of today's traditional workshops (Peña & McCallum, ,b; Quinn, ).…”

Raw Materials for Archaeological Pottery from the Campania Region of Italy: A Petrophysical Characterization

“…We represented graphically the compositional fields of carefully selected chemical data, which are homogeneous and analytically consistent. It should be noted that other analytical chemical data exist (e.g., Rinaldi et al., ; Peña & McCallum, ), but were produced with different analytical procedures making it difficult to compare with our data set.…”

“…Despite recent archaeometric data on potsherds from Pompeii, the clayey raw materials exploited for ceramic production have yet to be accurately located. Peña and McCallum ( and ) indicated the occurrence of a well‐developed distribution network of pottery (either locally produced or imported) inside the city and hypothesized the exploitation of marine clays located in the Salerno province (the Ogliara and Montecorvino outcrops) and/or fluvial deposits from the Sarno flood plain, variably mixed with volcanic temper. Heavy weathered volcanic deposits may have been another source (e.g., Peña, ) for the production of cooking wares due to their good refractory properties.…”

“…Recently, the ancient city has been part of a large archaeological research program (the Kyme projects) resulting in new archaeometric data for locally produced and imported pottery. Particular attention has been focused on cooking ware, taking into account that Cuma was the main center of a presumed manufacturing district referred to as the Campanian Cookware industry (Peña & McCallum, ). Archaeometric analysis of ceramics, including internal red‐slip cookware ( Rosso Pompeiano ), probably the Cumanae Testae of classical sources (Pucci, ), ranging in age from the 1st century B.C.…”

Another One Bites the Dust: Quality Control and Firing Technology in the Production of Medieval Greyware Ceramics in Catalonia, Spain

“…Other objects may have been damaged by the explosion of a neighbouring pot, or the collapse of the kiln structure itself (Peña , 33). A more general term is ‘production debris', which in addition to wasters also includes lumps of worked clay (e.g., Peña and McCallum ), blobs of melted ceramic material (Pollock et al . ), discarded raw materials, spent fuel and the remains of collapsed kilns and other structures.…”