Roman Inscriptions from Austria - Part IV

Epigraphic documents offer an invaluable independent source of information, especially in a Roman province such as Noricum, which received only sporadic mention in the works of contemporary historians. Beside the well known monumental inscriptions there is a steadily growing number of the so called instrumentum domesticum, which puts fresh light on different areas such as social, economic and military history. A systematic overlook or study of these cursive (graffiti) and other inscriptions on pottery, iron or bronze made tools etc. seems rather impossible because of the lack of corpora and databases. Few of this material has been published in partly unknown periodicals or excavation reports, while the majority of these instrumenta is still unpublished, yet undiscovered in the museums or other deposits. In 1987 M. Hainzmann has initiated a long term project for collecting and new editing of the "Kleininschriften auf Gebrauchsgegenständen", beginning with the modern provinces of Carinthia, Upper Austria and Salzburg. Meanwhile this data has steadily grown to number of 10.000 inscriptions, containing all kinds of source material: potter stamps on amphoras and samian ware; military stamps on bricks and roof tiles as well as graffiti on a variety of other objects. Some of them do even mention the personal names of the Celtic population, others give the name of their gods. There are still three provinces to be searched for instrumenta inscriptions: Lower Austria (within the Noricum territory), East-Tyrol and Styria, a work that could be done in a last effort by the help of R. Wedenig, whose experience in identifying fragmentary finds has made him a specialist for this field. After three earlier campaigns of documenting Roman inscriptions it is absolutely necessary to registrate and study the missing source-material of the mentioned territories in order to finish the editorial project of TENOR (Testimonia Epigraphica Norica) and to keep the Internet-Database alive.

The aim of the long term research project is to create a database of all objects inscribed in the province of Noricum during the Roman period. By now more than 12.000 inscriptions have been collected. The project was concerned with Instrumenta inscriptions in the modern provinces of (East-)Tyrol, Styria and Lower Austria (within the Noricum territory), covering all kinds of inscriptions mainly on portable articles used in public or private life. The work consisted of three stages: the first crucial step was to identify and study all the items preserved in the museum collections by autopsy. Thousands of pieces have been found during excavations in the Roman towns of Aguntum, Cetium and Solva in the last decades. The objects were documented with A5-sized files holding information about site of discovery, depository, bibliography, dating, description, origin, transcription of the inscription(s) together with drawings, rubbings or photographs. The data are beeing compiled electronically on datafiles based on ASCII-Code, to be published in part as book- or on-line-edition. At last the project produced three new volumes of the TENOR-series edited by Manfred Hainzmann, containing the materials in the museums of Enns and Wels (published 2000) and the complete epigraphic (KWIC-) index for Upper Austria (to be published 2002 together with a CD). A new website of the project is currently under development. The vast majority of the inscriptions are potter`s stamps on manufactored goods dating from the middle of the first century AD to the middle of the third century, f. e. terra sigillata imported from Italy (Arezzo, Po Valley), samian ware from Gaul (La Graufesenque, Lezoux) and Germany (Rheinzabern), amphorae (a lot of them coming from Istria), mortars and Roman lamps bearing maker`s names (Firmalampen) mainly from Italy. Many graffiti cut after firing on different types of clay-vessels can be interpreted as ownership-marks consisting of single names or X- shaped signs. Several pieces of coarse pottery of local production found in the Solva region are showing potter`s marks (on lids and beaded feeds of bowls) also known from some other sites in the southern part of Noricum. In Solva there are also numerous storage vessels with pottter`s marks and several loom weights with uninterpreted graffiti to be found. Here and in some other cases there seem to be (regional) patterns of distribution due to geographic or chronological reasons.