J. Theodore Peña

Internal red-slip cookware (Pompeian red ware) from Cetamura del Chianti, Italy: mineralogical composition and provenience

Excavations carried out at Cetamura, a small Etruscan/Roman settlement in the Chianti Mountains, have yielded a small quantity of internal red-slip cookware (IRSC, also known as Pompeian red ware) pans and lids. This variety of pottery, manufactured from the third century B.C. to the second century A.C., was the earliest of the mass-produced export cookwares that came to proliferate during the Roman Empire. A program of mineralogical analysis involving low-power microscopic examination, refiring, and petrographic analysis shows that the group of materials from Cetamura includes vessels belonging to three distinct fabric classes. Fabric Class 1, by far the most common at the site, contains clastic materials and appears likely to have been produced somewhere in northern Etruria during the second century B.C. This is a result of some interest, since it has been widely assumed that the early centers of IRSC production were located in the Bay of Naples area. Fabric Classes 2 and 3, both rare at Cetamura, contain volcanic materials and are likely to have been produced somewhere in southern Etruria, the Rome area, or the Bay of Naples area during the second century B.C. and first century A.C., respectively. The mineralogical composition of all three fabric classes suggests that IRSC workshops may have exploited clay sources that yielded base-clays particularly well suited for the manufacture of cookwares. Further such studies may permit the reconstruction of broader patterns in the production and distribution of this class of pottery.

Pottery in Archaeology

Part I. History and Potential: 1. History of pottery studies 2. The potential of pottery as archaeological evidence Part II. Practicalities: A Guide to Pottery Processing and Recording: 3. Integration with research designs 4. Life in the pot shed 5. Fabric analysis 6. Classification of form and decoration 7. Illustration 8. Pottery archives 9. Publication Part III. Themes in Ceramic Studies: 10. Making pottery 11. Archaeology by experiment 12. Craft specialisation and standardisation of production 13. Pottery fabrics 14. Form 15. Quantification 16. Chronology 17. Production and distribution 18. Pottery and function 19. Assemblages and sites Conclusion: the future of pottery studies.

Issues in the Study of Rural Craft Production in Roman Italy

The past two decades have seen the investigation of Roman craft products come into its own as a field of study, as evidenced by developments such as the establishment in 1995of the Instrumentumworking group,with its semi-annual Bulletin Instrumentum and monograph series Monographies Instrumentum,1 and the founding in 2007 of facta—A Journal of RomanMaterial Culture Studies, since reconstituted as herom—Journal on Hellenistic and Roman Material Culture.2 Particularly important was the launching in 2001 of crafts— Structures, implantation, et rôle économique et position sociale de l’artisanat Antique en Italie et dans les Provinces occidentale de l’Empire Romain—a fouryear project supported by the European Commission under the Culture 2000 initiative that involved regional studies of Roman craft production by research groups based in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Spain, France, Italy, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.3 In Italy, specifically, Sara Santoro directed the paar (Produzione Artigianale in Ambiente Rurale) research initiative under the aegis of crafts. This involved a comprehensive survey of the published evidence for craft production inGallia Cisalpina (in effect, northern Italy) during theRoman period, producing, among other things, volcanus, a searchable database for internal project use,4 and a monograph of fundamental importance for the study of Roman-period craft production in Italy, Artigianato e produzione nella Cisalpina: Parte i: Proposte di metodo e prime applicazioni.5