page_title: Ancient Roman pottery
section_title: Terra sigillata or red-gloss wares
hierarchical_section_title: Ancient Roman pottery / Fine wares / Terra sigillata or red-gloss wares
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Céramique sigillée, époque gallo-romaine, musées de la Cour d'Or à Metz.
context_page_description: Pottery was produced in enormous quantities in ancient Rome, mostly for utilitarian purposes. It is found all over the former Roman Empire and beyond. Monte Testaccio is a huge waste mound in Rome made almost entirely of broken amphorae used for transporting and storing liquids and other products – in this case probably mostly Spanish olive oil, which was landed nearby, and was the main fuel for lighting, as well as its use in the kitchen and washing in the baths.
  It is usual to divide Roman domestic pottery broadly into coarse wares and fine wares, the former being the everyday pottery jars, dishes and bowls that were used for cooking or the storage and transport of foods and other goods, and in some cases also as tableware, and which were often made and bought locally. Fine wares were serving vessels or tableware used for more formal dining, and are usually of more decorative and elegant appearance. Some of the most important of these were made at specialised pottery workshops, and were often traded over substantial distances, not only within, but also between, different provinces of the Roman Empire.
context_section_description: The designation 'fine wares' is used by archaeologists for Roman pottery intended for serving food and drink at table, as opposed to pots designed for cooking and food preparation, storage, transport and other purposes. Although there were many types of fine pottery, for example, drinking vessels in very delicate and thin-walled wares, and pottery finished with vitreous lead glazes, the major class that comes first to mind is the Roman red-gloss ware of Italy and Gaul make, and widely traded, from the 1st century BC to the late 2nd century AD, and traditionally known as terra sigillata. These vessels have fine, fairly hard and well-fired buff to pink fabrics, with a naturally glossy surface slip ranging in colour from light orange to quite a bright red. The variations in the colour and texture of both body fabric and slip, as well as the vessel-shapes and the designs on the decorated forms can enable a trained student to identify source, date and often individual workshop quite accurately. Arretine ware, made at Arezzo in Tuscany, was the pre-eminent type of fine pottery in the 1st century BC and early 1st century AD, and was succeeded by samian ware, manufactured in a number of centres in Gaul, modern France and Germany. However the definition of all these terms has varied and evolved over the many generations during which the material has been studied. Technically, red-gloss wares have much in common with earlier Greek painted pottery, but the decorated forms employ raised, relief decoration rather than painting.
  African Red Slip (ARS) ware belonged to the same tradition, and continued to be made much later than Italian and Gaulish sigillata, right through to the Islamic conquest. ARS in turn influenced the production of Phocaean red slip, which is common in the Eastern Mediterranean and also appeared occasionally as far west as Southern France and Britain.
  The production of related types of wares existed in Asia Minor and in other eastern regions of the Empire (Eastern Sigillata wares), while the Iberian provinces also had local industries producing terra sigillata hispanica, which had some similarities with the Gaulish products.
  Most of these wares were widely distributed and produced on an industrial scale (the largest kilns could fire up to 40,000 pieces at a time ), and undoubtedly using a high degree of specialisation within the workshops. The names of many potters and factory-owners are known from the potters' marks frequently applied to fine wares, and can be highly informative. Cnaius Ateius was an especially prominent producer at Arezzo, but wares with his stamps can be shown by modern analysis of their clay to have been produced in Pisa in Tuscany, and at branch factories at both Lyon and La Graufesenque in modern France. However, the interpretation of name-stamps can be more complex than it appears at first sight. Bold name-stamps visible in decorated areas advertise the name of the factory, but the names of individual artisans working within the pottery, the bowl-makers, appear on plain vessels, while the moulds for decorated bowls were also sometimes signed freehand by the mould-makers, and their signatures also sometimes appear on finished vessels. Theoretically, a decorated vessel might bear the mould-maker's name, that of the bowl-maker or finisher (for example, on the rim), and the 'brand-name' of the factory in the decoration. The use of slave labour in the Italian workshops is unproven, though some names are certainly of liberti (freedmen, that is, freed former slaves). The site of La Graufesenque in South Gaul, near Millau, has been extensively studied and excavated. Its products had an immensely wide distribution in the later 1st century AD, and sherds have been found from India to the Sudan and Scotland. 
  In 1895, the German scholar Hans Dragendorff produced a classification of vessel shapes in Roman red gloss pottery that is still used (as e.g. "Drag. 27" or "Dr.27" to refer to the small biconvex-profiled cup). Other scholars added to his numbered forms, and some archaeologists working on the pr
caption: Red gloss terra sigillata ware with relief decoration. Compare the plain unglossed restored section to the left.
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