Provenance Studies on Pottery in the Central Mediterranean

The identification of the provenance of ancient pottery represents one of the main topics of actual pottery research in archaeology as the place of origin of a certain object can be used as an indicator for cultural contacts, economic exchange, or change in political power, to mention only a few. During the last twenty years adequate instruments to respond to these demands of modern archaeology have been developed both on theoretical and practical levels, resulting in a classification of pottery according to fabrics as guide fossils for geographical regions. The main focus of the present project lies on establishing a well-founded basis for provenance studies in the Southern Mediterranean comprising both the Greeks of Magna Grecia and Sicily and the Carthaginians with their most important centre of Carthage on the Northern coast of Africa, connected by a complex system of various contacts from Archaic to Hellenistic periods. Research will concentrate on export-orientated wares like glazed wares, mainly of Colonial production centers of at least regional importance, like e.g. Poseidonia, and on production sites with export activity like the Campana A workshop(s). Another topic will include Greek and Punic transport amphorae produced in Magna Grecia, Sicily and North Africa. The basis for the project is given by a large data-collection at the Institute of Classical Archaeology at Vienna comprising about 950 samples of more than 30 production sites in the area of the Southern Central Mediterranean. It is enlarged by a consistent group of samples of Punic pottery from Carthage and from Punic Sicily, made available by the Vakgroep Archeologie & Oude Geschiedenis van Europa of the University of Gent. The results of this research will be made accessible by a publication designed as web-based information system, corresponding to the demands of open access policy, favoured now by many institutions of the International scientific community. It will consist of contributions consisting mainly of texts (corresponding to text parts in printed books) and of a catalogue of fabrics designed as data-base. In this way we hope to avoid problems normally connected with the publication of large collections of fabric-data in conventional print-form as this application is supposed to grow continually by being enlargened by fabrics defined on other (production-)sites by colleagues.

The project gives a contribution to the study of ancient economic and cultural exchanges in the Central Mediterranean from the 5th to the 2nd c. BC when this area was dominated by Greek colonies (mainly in Southern Italy) and Punic settlements (in North Africa, Spain, Sardinia and part of Sicily). Ceramic artifacts present one of our main resources for reconstructing the political, cultural and economic relationships between these cities and regions and help us to get a better understanding of their mechanisms and their quantitative proportions. Thus the main focus of the present project was to facilitate the use of pottery data by which we can detect the origin of commodities like table wares or amphorae for wine and olive oil by developing a new method of describing and classifying the ceramic body of the objects (so-called fabric). These data were made accessible to the public in a web-based publication, named FACEM (=Fabrics of the Central Mediterranean, www.facem.at) which gives an overview of existing production sites and their characteristics and at the same time allows the comparison of new data by several search tools.