TERRA SIGILLATA ITALICA PRODUCTION
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2020-10-09

During Roman late republic and early empire, some ceramic industries became increasingly mass-produced and diffused within and beyond the Roman world. The product symbol of this expanded market and organized production is undoubtedly terra sigillata, a red and glossy table ware manufactured in Italy since the second half of the 1st century BCE and then in other provinces such as Gaul and Germany. In my paper, I will describe the organization of the workshops in central Italy as part of the rural economy and therefore involved in a more comprehensive landscape management, including the use of resources, space, labour, and market infrastructures. In particular, through the combination of archaeological and paleoenvironmental data, I will contextualize the exploitation of vegetal resources as fuel for the kilns in the broader rural economy. Not only result of the cutting of forests, wood supply could be satisfied using agricultural waste, in a production cycle that we would today define “circular economy”. Furthermore, the owners and managers of the workshops were the same gentes that owned the agricultural properties, element that illustrates again the close integration of agricultural and ceramic productions and had as a possible outcome the deployment of the labour force in different activities according to the needs. In this perspective in conclusion, I will discuss the opportunity to include the pottery production in the all-encompassing Roman land administration, regarding fields, forests, waterways and roads, shaping the landscape in several ways, among which the well-known centuriation grid constitutes only an important, but not exhaustive, fragment.


Author(s): La Rosa, Lorenza (University of Oslo)