Dolia

This past week involved a good bit of travel and this meant that I had some time to read in flights and in airports. I spent a good bit of that times with Caroline Cheung’s recent-ish book on Dolia: The Containers That Made Rome and Empire of Wine (2024).

The book is good. It manages to thread the needle between a dry-as-dust study of dolia as containers and a more sophisticated analysis of the role of these massive vessels in shaping Roman society and economy. In a perfect world, I maybe would offer a thorough review of this book, but I just don’t have the bandwidth to do that so I’m going to focus on a few interesting points.

1. Containerization. There is something unapologetically modern about this term (and anyone who has studied the rise of the shipping container and the pallet as the manifestation of units that shape our everyday lives), but Cheung’s book demonstrates how it likewise applied to the use of dolia in the 1st century BC/AD. Particularly relevant was the clear relationship between the volume of dolia and transport amphora which was sometimes marked on the sides of the vessels. The size of dolia, in turn, shaped the size of wine cellars and storerooms. The most remarkable manifestation of this — one which echoes modern containerization concerns — is the wine tankers built around a series of massive dolia cemented into the hull of a specially constructed ship.

2. Storage Strategies. Cheung does a nice job connecting the rise in the use of dolia with new strategies of production. In particular, she contrasted the strategies in Italy where even larger farms had relatively small numbers of dolia when compared with the farms in Spain and Gaul where wine production occurred at a massive scale. In fact, single estates in Spain and Gaul produced enough wine each year to supply a town. Dolia not only allowed this kind of large scale production of wine by creating reliable and stable storage at production sites while wine fermented, but also at distribution sites near cities. While Cheung never articulates it in this way, the vessel itself has a kind of “agency” (broadly construed) in transforming the economic systems that supplied wine to the Roman Empire to the same degree that amphora did.

3. Conspicuous Displays. One of the more fascinating elements of the book is the use of dolia as signs of prosperity by wealthy elites. The use of dolia in dining areas in the garden district of Pompey would have amplified the luxurious surroundings. The presence of dolia in storerooms and processing areas near the public areas of Roman villas likely connect spaces of display to those of production making clear that dolia do more than serve the practical needs of Roman elite farmers, but also represent visual signs of a well-run and prosperous household. 

4. Repair and Reuse. Chueng’s interest in the material form of the dolia, which were complex to manufacture and prone to breakage, made them both valuable (and expensive) and worth repairing. Studying dozens of repaired dolia allowed her to create a typology of repair strategies that demonstrated different approaches, levels of expertise and situations. Among the most fascinating to me were those repairs that occurred prior to firing as a way to reinforce dolia that have shown signs of vulnerability. The use of lead to mend dolia that either cracked in use revealed that not all menders were equally adept at repairing these massive vessels. More than that, most of the dolia found in secondary contexts were mended suggesting either a prolonged period of use or a failed mend.

5. The End of Dolia. Unlike most things in antiquity that disappear with the end of the ancient world, dolia stop being produced toward the end of the 1st century. This was largely because of the introduction of the barrel which were lighter, easier to make and repair, and more portable especially when disassembled for transport. Barrels introduced a new form of containerization with new affordance and new possibilities.