Cooking Ware as Indicator for Regional Trade and Exchange

Changes in political institutions can have larger or smaller effects on the way people live under these institutions. How can we assess these effects for a period as far away as the Roman Republic between the 4th-1st c? To answer this question for the everyday life of non- elite people in Romes hinterland, the project studies cooking ware from the Pontine region in southern Lazio, Italy. The aim is to track the movement of regional products, as well as those from more distant sources, and thus to map regional trade networks wherein the Pontine region participated. This will lead to a more nuanced understanding of the underlying power relations as well as forms of inequality, and will illuminate how broader changes at the macro-scale affected the everyday life of the rural population during the 4th-1st c. BC Republic. The proposed project combines techniques from several different disciplines, including archaeology, materials science (archaeometric analysis) and Roman economy to examine the origin and movement of the cooking ware to be studied. The results will be interpreted within a theoretical framework to explain the wider spectrum of production and consumption practices in 4th-1st c. BC Central Italy. While the proposed project deals with a specific time period and part of the world, its merging with a broader framework will facilitate new dialogues and understanding of cross-cultural and cross-regional studies in the Central Mediterranean. Further originality of the project lies in its comprehensive dual concern: on the one hand, it includes all the steps of the production process of cooking ware to distribution and consumption; on the other, it approaches production and consumption as part of dynamic human activities and relationships in specific and changing contexts. The study is anchored in a concern with how people produced and used everyday objects, and to what extent their interactions with these ceramic objects were affected by socio-political and economic realignments made at the elite level.

Cooking Ware as Indicator for Regional Trade and Exchange The project is an interdisciplinary study of coarse ware from the Pontine region in southern Lazio, Italy, that addresses the question of the region's position within local, regional, and wider central Mediterranean networks between the 4th and 1st centuries BCE. Its first objective is to reconstruct the production technology and provenance of 4th to 1st century BCE coarse ware from several sites in southern Lazio. To achieve this, an integrated compositional approach is adopted, combining mineralogical analysis with chemistry. The second objective is to shed light on the integration of southern Lazio into broader production and trade networks between the 4th and 1st centuries BCE, by comparing the results with previous data on coarse ware prevalent in the region at that time. The results indicate that the coarse ware studied was produced with red-firing clay and fired in an oxidising atmosphere at a low temperature (< 900 C). Differences among the coarse ware exist in the paste recipes (e.g., intentionally added temper). The composition of the coarse ware suggests that the majority was produced locally at the sites of Satricum (present-day Borgo Faiti), Fregellae, and Nemi, even if this is not always supported by evidence for workshops. The results further indicate a lively trade in coarse ware from the Alban Hills and the Tiber Valley, north of Rome, suggesting that the study region was integrated into the marketing of pottery that was predominant in Lazio between the 4th and 1st centuries BCE. Changes in regional trade seem to have taken place when ceramic production at Satricum ceased in the 3rd century BCE and potters began producing coarse ware in other settlements, including Forum Appii and Norba (present-day Norma).