Joy in Small Bits of Pottery

I’m experimenting with the Flock browser again to see if that will solve my RSS problem. My previous readers have regularly skipped some weblogs, particularly if those on Blogger. It’s a shame as there’s some interesting posts I’ve been missing.

One is a photo of an Iron Age Pot Sherd at Back Garden Archaeology. What’s interesting is that it appears to be locally made and contemporanous with Roman pottery. That would suggest continuity of settlement. It’s a really nice photo because you can see the many occlusions in the pot, which would make me guess Iron Age. You see some change in assemblages after the Roman occupation because, apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order, the Romans also brought much more stylish pottery.

Samian Ware. Photo (cc) Wessex Archaeology.

The pot above is Samian Ware. The sherds I’ve found when I’ve been digging in north-west Europe have probably not been from Samos, but from Trier, which was a major manufacturing centre for Samian ware. It doesn’t always come in such convenient pieces. Often you only get sherds. An example is the photo at Aardvarchaeology, which points to the weblog of the sherd’s discoverer.

Archaeologists like Samian ware, not just because it looks nice but also because it rapidly changes in fashion during the Imperial period, so if you find a good bit you can put an earliest date what you’re digging to with a decade or so. I’m not an expert, so I don’t know if the sherd photographed by Pierre Petersson is distinctive enough to date, but regardless his site is worth visiting because you’ll be looking at a very special pot sherd.

It was found in Småland, Sweden. This is not traditionally considered to have been part of the Roman Empire, but you’d expect to see some Roman pottery outside the empire’s borders due to trade. However as Martin notes, you don’t see a lot in Sweden. I can’t recall the exact reference, but Moses Finley – an expert on the ancient economy – showed that a find of many Roman potsherds in Sweden could be reconstructed into just one pot. This he argued showed there was no serious trade with the North.

Yet it’s also known there were trade links between the Baltic and the Mediterranean in the Iron Age. Greek wine would travel north and Baltic amber and furs would be sent south. Not necessarily all in one trip, but passed between neighbouring settlements acting as middlemen. Each middleman would skim some of the trade of for himself and so items got progressively rarer the further you got from the source. So are the few sherds found in Sweden the evidence of a few pots being traded as exotic items, or was there a large settlement drawing in trade from the Roman Empire that lies waiting to be found? I don’t know enough about Scandinavian archaeology to say either way. What is known that in Britain large settlements were forming as trading centers in the centuries before the Roman invasion. The presence of a large market to the south did make some forms activity economically viable.

The two sherds show one of the oddities of archaeology. It would be possible to dig up sherds like these elsewhere and not find them at all interesting. What makes them interesting isn’t what they are – it’s where they are. The context, being able to show what was found with them, is what means that a discarded fragment of pottery has a tale to tell.