The Sum of Its Parts: The Relationship between Pottery Workshops and Urban Spaces (15 min)

Presenters

Erica A. Venturo, University of Michigan

Abstract

Sigillata workshops—much like urban centers themselves—mobilized different types of networks in the Early Roman Imperial period based on their geographic scale of interaction, serving as conduits for materials, ideas, and individuals to move upon regional pathways. This paper compares the movement of terra sigillata from La Graufesenque workshop in central Gaul with eastern sigillata produced in Sagalassos during the first century C.E. to investigate what role each of these physical centers of sigillata production fulfilled within their broader networks of economic and social distribution. This comparative study elucidates that even in the same period, workshops that produced the same class of pottery in geographically disparate regions operated within different types of networks and engaged differently with urban spaces. La Graufesenque functioned primarily as an economic center, with only tangential physical ties to nearby urban centers via roads and trade routes. In contrast, Sagalassos’s eastern sigillata production functioned as both an economic and social center, physically overlooking the monumental center of the city. Overall, this paper exemplifies that the intrinsic connection between sigillata workshops and urban centers was for pottery production centers to serve as switch boards between various types of networks of connectivity. Sigillata workshops had a duality within the broader social and economic infrastructural networks of the urban spaces they engaged with—often physically fragmenting metropolitan and countryside agricultural activities, while economically connecting them as major bridges of commerce. And socially, sigillata workshops represented weak ties between sigillata manufacturers and their regional clientele, even if the workshop itself was not geographically located within urban spaces.

  AIA-7A