 So today I have a pleasure to introduce our dear colleague, Ted Pina from the Classics Department. Ted and I share a common friend, Peter Bale, who used to be a postdoc here and a very lively person. And through Peter, I got to know Ted a little bit. I also share our love for pottery that I think both Ted and I really like to work on pottery. So when I look at the title today, the Palestine pottery project, the study and online publication of the 20 tons of pottery from downtown Royal. You beat me. I've got about four tons of pottery from one of my sites. These are metric tons, too. So please welcome Ted. Thank you, Junco. Yeah, so I guess the lights should go down. Hi, I'm going to talk about research I've been doing in Rome for pretty much most of my post-PhD life. I've been super busy the last few weeks, so it's not going to be the most organized or content-rich talk you'll ever hear. And I also wrote it with the assumption that there would probably be no classical archaeologists or classicists in the room. That turns out to be a false assumption. But I'm kind of leaning on more methodological issues that I thought might be of interest to people, principally in an anthropology department. So that's my apology here at the beginning. So I'll lead you through a bit of the history of the work and then I'll talk a bit about the methods and then a bit about what we're doing to try to publish our results. So that's basically the scheme. What I'm talking about is the Roman period pottery assemblage from excavations carried out in downtown Rome at the northeast corner of the Palatine Hill by a joint project of the American Academy in Rome and the Sculpey and Dendenza Archeologi di Roma, the Rome branch of the Italian Antiquity Service under the direction of Eric Hostetter from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign from 1989 to 1996. I'm the specialist in charge of studying and publishing the pottery. But to give you an idea of where we are, this is the northeast corner of the Palatine Rome. That's what it looks like, the Colosseum or the Flavian amphitheater right here. This is the famous monument, the Arch of Constantine right here. And we're just over the fence inside the archeological park right here. It's this interesting mid-late imperial building in brick-based concrete that was jutting out of the lower slopes of the Palatine Hill. And the basic research design was kind of a classic Roman topographical one. Figure out what was going on in this corner of this central important place in the Roman Empire. The site was decided, divided up into four sectors. I'm showing you this in part because you can see the structures as they jut out. A series of parallel barrel vaults with another layer of structures on top. There's a very confusing set of structures over here in sector A. The building was modified many times and probably never finished. The joke was, because it couldn't really tell what kind of building it was. It's probably a high-end residence, was that it was an apps factory because we kept finding apps as cutting apps as cutting apps as. And it was probably because of all of the kind of rethinking of how they were going to do things. Sector C was kind of a bust. This was all area that had been heavily, heavily disturbed in the modern period. Sector D was a set of largely unrelated things uphill. But those four site sectors will come back when I start talking about our publication. That's why I show you that plan. This is a view looking from west to east across sector A. When the excavations are in progress, you can see some of those apps. That's my former colleague at University Buffalo where I was before I came to Berkeley. Bradley Alt, who was a sector supervisor. And here's a view down into one of the deeper chambers where excavations punched down to try to get back to understanding a bit of what was going on topographically in this corner of the Palatine Hill before the construction of this building. That's Louise Rohl, an archaeologist from Norway. The project involved all of the foreign institutes up on the Geniculum Hill in Rome, the Americans, the Norwegians, and the Finns. And so it was an international project. And I show you this slide to give you some idea about why there's 20 tons of pottery. Most of the structure had been pretty much drifted under a massive amount of late imperial, basically from the later third into probably the end of the fifth, or maybe the early sixth century common era, dumping. Which filled up all of these substructures of the building and made it difficult for our architectural historians and topographers to get their job done. But what it meant was that for those of us who were working on processing the fines, we had massive amounts of material. And you see here one of the fills inside one of the smaller barrel vaults in the structure. The materials were processed and stored off-site. So here's a Google Earth image of Rome. And so we're right down here. Here's the, actually I've misplaced that. That should actually be about over here. Here's the Colosseum. Here's the Forum. Here's the Palatine Hill. And oh, I see. This has shifted somehow. And that's weird. Yeah. This should also be, I hope this won't be throughout my slideshow. This should be on the American Academy in Rome, which is actually right there, which is at the highest point in the city, the top of the geniculum or the geniculo. So every Friday, this, literally this sort of flatbed truck would carry many, many scores of cassette, the standard plastic crates that you put fines in from our temporary storage down in the Forum Palatine Archaeological Park up to one of the different structures at the American Academy in Rome and offload all of this material. And we would then charge part of the team to stay off-site and have to sit in the shade and drink beer and high-top Rome and scrub pot sherds all day. So we could get this material processed. And then we would set it out in our drawing screens. Here you see several lots of pottery that are out in these wooden screens with mesh bottoms so they can draw in the sun. Here's a detail looking into one. I assume probably no one out there is familiar with any of this pottery, but if you're Roman pottery specialist, you can look into that and start saying, oh yeah, this is this, this is that, that's that, right? So this stuff is all quite familiar to me. As I'll point out in a few minutes, it comes from many, many different parts of the Roman world, the Roman Empire. In fact, I'll tell you a little bit about what the basic assemblage is like. We have a certain amount of high-end tablewares, things like bowls and cups and plates and things of that sort. And in the Roman imperial period, what this basically is, is material made with a really fine grain, generally carbonate, ceramic paste. And it's covered with a red slip, which centers a little bit when fired so it gets quite shiny and glossy. It's not a glaze, it's a slip. And the earliest industry of this was that centered around Oretzo, and modern scholars have called that Terra Sigillata. And what happens is that from when this industry takes off in the later 1st century BC and to the 1st century, I guess I should say CE, what you find is around the Roman Empire, kind of in a series of processes that are, in effect, import substitution, different provinces begin mimicking this and making their own versions of it. So in the upper left, you see a few sherds of actually Italian-Italian Sigillata, probably made in Oretzo, although there were other centers. In the lower right, what you see is what we call South Gaelic Sigillata, because already by the 1st century AD there were other workshops in South and Central Gaul and making quite nice imitations of this. It's easy for a pottery specialist to look at it and tell the difference, particularly if it's broken, but I imagine your average consumer in the Roman world would have been different to the difference and maybe been unable even to distinguish them. Eventually, beginning the 1st century AD, but particularly taking off in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, what one finds is an explosion of this sort of regional production of this red-slip tableware in Roman North Africa, particularly in the part of the province of Africa Proconsolaris later given other names under reorganization that more or less corresponds to the modern nation state of Tunisia. And so here I show you a couple of pairs of sherds of what we would call African Sigillata C, which is made in Central Tunisia and African Sigillata D, which is made in Northern Tunisia, somewhere up in the Tunis Carthage area. We have a substantial amount of cookwares in our site assemblage, and so in the upper left what you see are some examples of what is our standard regionally manufactured cookware. You can see a lot of it has sooting on it. In the lower right, you see three examples of what we call African cookware. It's an interesting phenomenon that this super high quality cookware was manufactured basically in three different forms, principally in Northern Tunisia, and exported around much of the Roman world. In many consumer contexts, at Rome and in Rome's Port Astia, for example, in the fourth century AD, you find as much cookware originating in Tunisia as you might originating in actually in West Central Italy. I show you in the lower left a sherd of... We have a very small amount of what are hand-built cookwares. Some made probably in Sardinia, I don't think this sherd was, some perhaps in the island of Pental de Ria, which shows up in this persistent but very minor presence in the site assemblage. But it's interesting to think about the dynamics of manufacture and exchange, which also lead to very small amounts of this hand-built cookware that is not thrown on a wheel showing up in a site assemblage in downtown Rome. You get various sorts of utilitarian wares. In fact, as your standard regionally manufactured utilitarian ware, which we just call fine ware, it's got a very fine body made in a local marine clay. To guss it up a bit, they sometimes will cover vessels with a fairly low quality reddish slip. Very, very rarely, and here's one sherd of that, they actually cover it with a true glaze. It's kind of a greenish to turquoise color. The Romans did possess glaze technology, but they very rarely cared to avail themselves of it. It's an interesting phenomenon. It's probably imitating faience when they do this. And though we're right, inevitably we have African wares as well. We find a certain amount of utilitarian wares that are produced in North Tunisia and Central Tunisia, also showing up in our site assemblage. The bulk of our material, though, by weight, something like about 80%, and I should say that the cookware is about 10%, the other things are about 10%, but then the transport amphras are about 80% by weight. And probably people have some idea about what transport amphras are. They're these standardized terracotta containers for the packaging and distribution of principally certain basic food stuffs in the Roman world, including wine, olive oil, and then this family of what we call processed fish products, including things like fish sauces like garum and filets of fish and things like that, we call those semi-liquids. A few other things are also transported in transport amphras. But the long and the short of it is this, is that different regions and locales around the Roman Empire had characteristic classes or kinds of transport amphras that were increasingly able to show were for the most part employed for packaging a particular kind of food stuff. And if you master this material, that gives you the opportunity to use this discarded terracotta packaging as a proxy you see for the production and distribution of food stuffs around the Roman world. And so again, I can look at this slide and tell you that's a K26, which is a little bit argued about what it held, but probably a fish products amphra from Northern or Central Tunisia. That's a K52, which is a wine amphra from Calabria. That one on the right, which looks like they put the handles on upside down, is a wine amphra from Roman Egypt. These couple of sherds down here are your bullet-shaped Gaza wine amphra, which is used for packaging wine from Gaza. And lower right, that's your late Roman III, which is an amphra used for packaging wine probably from the Meander Valley in what today is Anatolian Turkey. And so these things are all pretty well studied. And the next slide though will kind of maybe, I hope it's not invisible to you, but it'll show you a bit of where around the Roman world we have amphras from. We actually probably haven't counted them up. We probably have a few score different sorts of amphras we've identified by now. This is just a subset of some of the more important ones, but you see things like the famous Dressel 20, the big globular amphra that's produced mainly with theia in southern Spain, Roman Bytica, which is a major package for olive oil. You see things like a South Gallic wine amphra over here, things like a Palestinian wine amphra over there called the Javit, for example, in Hebrew. And so what this allows us to do then is to get some sense about the supply of these various foodstuffs from various parts of the Roman world to the center of the empire. Over a period, I neglected to mention the dating of our deposits of roughly about four or five hundred years. They tend to pick up about the middle of the first century CE and probably run down to the end of the fifth century CE and maybe into the early sixth century CE. It's a little bit difficult for me to figure out when the main part of the sequence ends. One other point I want to make about working with Roman pottery is, I hope, brought up by this slide and that is you're not compelled to, now don't take offense to prehistory, to act as if you're a prehistorian. Roman archaeology is not quite an historical archaeology, let's say, as Laurie Wilkie may practice it, but we do have access to written texts of various sorts in kind of, you know, a spasmodic uneven way, I guess. Now if you're working in the center of the empire in the imperial period, you're somewhat favored because there's a high likelihood of certain sorts of text that you can draw on to provide context for interpreting your pottery. And this is something that over the years I've taken seriously and worked hard on. That is to try to exhaust the possibilities of using these sorts of documents or works of literature to provide a context. So I show you here on the upper left, here's a shot of a hand grasping an astrakhan, a temporary document made on a pot shirt, actually on a piece of a wall of African transport amphora, which was found in the harbor area of Carthage, the great port of Roman North Africa, that records nitty-gritty of the state's efforts to mobilize and weigh olive oil, collected as tax in kind in the later fourth century, and then package it and then ship it out probably in substantial measure to Rome to provide a significant portion of the olive oil consumed by the Plebs Urbana, the population of Rome. And I got interested in these at one point. I hadn't heard about them before, and I put in a little footnote referring to them because they've been published summarily in, I think, 1911. And I got drawn into it. They actually had that publication in our crummy library at University of Buffalo. So I went and looked at it. And my footnote turned into a sentence and then turned into a paragraph and then turned into a section in this article I was writing. And eventually became a 116-page article that I published in a supplement of the Journal of Roman Archaeology, which provides this kind of thick description of what's going on with this set of documents, which I eventually also gained access to. Everyone thought they had been lost. On the right, I show you a fragment of an inscription from downtown Rome, which is really interesting. What it is is it's an inscription which specifies to landowners who are delivering wine to Rome being collected as tax in kind, probably in the 4th century ADCE again. The various tips they have to pay to all the various functionaries that are there to receive the wine. And you probably can't read that Latin because it's not clear and you probably don't read Latin anyway, but I know there are a couple of people in the room. But it says some cool stuff. It says, let me pick out the part. It says, oh, and with regard to the ampullae, which is the diminutive of amphora, it says after the tasting, it's been decided they should be given back to the landowner. And that's kind of an interesting and disputed line. But the point is, is the amphora, as I'm showing you there, that's the neck and then the base of K-52, which is in fact a wine amphora of this period from kind of the Calabria area just across the straits of Messina from Sicily. And so if we're trying to understand the explosion of this sort of amphora appearing in our assemblage, we have to take account of the fact that by the 4th century the state is collecting wine as tax and kind and selling it in Rome at a subsidized price. So that's the kind of thing that I think you need to do to understand this. So by the end of this period, with my tenure clock running out, I decided to take one large deposit of about 500 kilograms of pottery in pretty good shape. That is pretty high levels of completeness, low levels of brokenness. We could date the deposit very, very tightly to about AD 300 plus, minus a few years. And to work that up, to use that as an opportunity to work out the methodology we were going to use for studying and publishing the material. And so I published that as a BAR volume in 1999, got tenure, that along with my 116-page article on those Osterka from Carthage. I show you a couple of the appendices from this in which I was developing some of the methodological discussion about how we were going to do this. Eventually, Eric Hostetter and Rasmus Brant, the site director and associate site director, published the first volume of the Palatine East reports, which discusses the architecture and the stratigraphic sequence and the history of the site and stuff like that. That was maybe about, I don't know, 2008 something. In about 2014, a team of fine specialists directed by Archer St. Clair, the history of art department at Rutgers University, published all of the finds other than the pottery. So glass and worked bone and worked stone and coins and things like that. And that just left me kind of failing to follow through on my part, which was to publish these 20 tons of pottery. But as I'll talk about, by that point, the way we published things had changed somewhat. In any rate, what happened was, after a hiatus in the late 90s when I was doing something else, in the early aughts, I wanted to go back and bring a team of grad students from my then institution, the University of Buffalo SUNY, to start working more seriously on the pottery than we had been able to do actually while the excavation was in progress and literally tons of material was flowing in every day, which we, to some extent, were able to quantify and sort, or weren't able to do any sort of detailed study of. So I was able to obtain money from the NEH for collaborative research and also miraculously from the Wintergren Foundation to support work. And so we did actually three field seasons in 01, 02, and 03, where we made substantial progress on the detailed publication of the material. We needed a name, so I gave it a nice peppy name of the Palatine East Pottery Project. We have our own logo. No one's laughing, but if you realize that the standard sort of maker stamp that you put on Italian sigilata is called Implanta Pettis in a footprint, we're not exactly sure why they do that. So one of my clever grad students sort of, you know, did this, this, this paste up. So we have our own Implanta Pettis logo. And I brought a couple of teams out with me then in 01, 02, and 03. Here we are posed in the four core of the American Academy in Rome for our team shots. And we made substantial progress then on more detailed work on the material. My main Finnish collaborator, Yana Ikahemo from Oulu University in Finland, has been charged with the, heading up the study and publication of the cookware component of the assemblage. And he made really great progress. He also kind of had to get tenure. And so he published a BAR volume on just the African cookware from the site where he gave a lot of attention to things like use alteration, drawing a lot, for example, on James Skibo's work on sooting and things of that sort with which you're perhaps familiar. And then flowing out from that, he and I and also my other associate director, Victor Martinez from Arkansas State University, published a series of short studies and methodological articles and things of that sort that were building on the work that we were doing in the years shortly after the, what do you call it, the by millennium? What's the word we use for the year 2000, Y2K year? Anyway, I then became department chair. I had a health crisis. My grant money ran out. I had other things to do. I couldn't go in the fields. I wrote this book, which is probably what got me my job here at Berkeley. It's kind of an extended essay, really on the life history of pottery in the Roman world. It was interesting to me more and more flowing from this. And it was only once I moved to Berkeley and settled in that I was able to begin to get back out into the field to try to bring this to closure. Among other things, the American Academy was sick and tired of much of their store and being full with our many hundreds of crates of pottery, and they wanted to know if we were eventually going to finish it and get it out. So we started pep-beasts, I guess, you can call it. And looking at that, I realized that, hmm, that looks a lot like Pepto-Bismol, doesn't it? So maybe there's some kind of sponsorship opportunity that I can take advantage of. I don't know if Pepto-Bismol still exists. I think it does. Any event. So what this involved was taking advantage of the URAP program here at Berkeley, which I think is a wonderful, wonderful thing. I was given a lab. Don't think fume hoods and lead shielding and Bunsen burners, but it's a room with a couple of tables in it that tucked under the eaves of Dunnell Hall in Dunnell 310B. It's called very majestically by me, the UC Berkeley Rural Material Culture Laboratory. But here, most semesters, I'll have two, three, four students under the university research apprenticeship program doing back-end data processing and various sorts of documentary work and things of that sort. Here you see, for example, some of the work we're doing on calculating capacities of transport amphora and a couple of students pretending to be hard at work in the lab for this picture. I also have been taking small groups out in the field with me to Rome every summer, anywhere from five to eight people, something like that. So when we're not hanging out in bars in the upper left, we are posing on the steps around. This is amazing. A building that's built on the foundations of what was Galileo's laboratory. Galileo's original scientific astronomical investigation has got him in trouble with the Pope. I'll show you a bit more about that in a minute. That's where one of our lab spaces is at the American Academy. So you might recognize some of you, I don't know if you know Amanda Dobrov, a senior now, anthropology major is doing a senior thesis with me on some of the material from the Palatine East. But this Google Earth image will kind of show you the very demanding circumstances under which we have to work. This is zooming in on the top of the Genicolo. Those of you who know Rome would know that this is what Romans called the Fontanone, the big fountain. It's a super famous place. It's the highest point in the city. For example, if you look at Roman holiday, the outside shots for, I'm going to get the wrong Hepburn, not Audrey, but Catherine Hepburn, she'll tool up in a little convertible and hop out and run into this building right here, which is now actually owned by the Spanish embassy. So there's always like these guards with machine guns in front of it. But this is like a super famous part of the city. It's the highest place. This massive building here is the main academy building, which was designed by McKim, Mead and White, purpose built to be an academy in the early 20th century. They own a bunch of real estate in the area. This, for example, is owned by the academy and it's where the US ambassador to the Vatican resides. So Newt Gingrich is going to be living there before long, which really kind of, if he's not already, which really makes one's flesh creak. But anyway, they own this villa across the street called the Villa Chiaravillo. And in the basement there are the archaeological storerooms. So a big part of our team is usually hard at work there. And that's kind of nice because you're underground and so you're out of that great heat that you'll experience in Rome in the summer. And then in the grounds and the American Academy, inside one of the big bastions in the Papal Walls right here, is this structure called the Casa Rustica. And that's the one that, as I pointed out, was it's founded on the remains of the building that was Galileo's laboratory when he did his initial astronomical observations. So here's the McKim, Mead and White building. Here's the Villa Chiaravillo, where most of us working down in the basement. It's also the building, so here's how long I've been doing this, where my daughter took her first steps and she graduated from Oberlin College about four years ago and is now working in IT. And here's a view of the Casa Rustica, the space out behind. Usually like the American Academy fellow when music is out there too, because he or she has to pound on a piano, so there's all of these soon-to-be-famous composers and stuff that you have to fight over the bathroom with. No, we rent apartments up in this part of Rome, which is called Monte Verde Vecchio, which again is a nice neighborhood. It's the highest area, so it's a little bit less hot and miserable, so it's a quick jog down hill to Trastevite to go out to restaurants and stuff like that. A little bit tougher to get back uphill after you've eaten and drunk a lot, but it's a very nice location. And we're moving ahead with our work here. Here I'm showing you, and you can't see this at all well, but this is the poster that Amanda Dobrov had accepted present at the AIA meetings, just held in Boston at the beginning of January. And Amanda, as about half the people who tried to attend, got sucked into the great, what's it called, cyclone bomb and vortex and wasn't able to make it. So this has never been presented, but it does exist. Okay, so what I want to do is move on a little bit now and talk about some of our methods and show you some of what we're doing. Some of this is standard and traditional, but some of it I think I can claim is also innovative. And again, between when I published that BAR volume in the late 90s and now really my intersection with the digital world has grown astronomically. Firstly, nothing I did in that involved digital anything. And now, of course, virtually everything we do does. We make an effort, first of all, to come up with a systematic way of recognizing discrete pottery fabrics, things that are made with what we can distinguish as distinct raw materials processed a distinct way. We'll classify as representing a fabric and to be able to help us identify that. We take advantage of a dinolite digital microscope, which allows us to quickly and easily shoot fracture surfaces, typically at a, what do you say? En grandimento. When you increase the size, I'm forgetting the English word for it, magnification. There you go. Magnification of about 40 to 50 times. Once you get beyond that with an untreated fracture surface, step the field things, make it not worth your while. But here you see, for example, the fracture surface of what's in fact some of this late imperial glazed pottery. You can actually see the glazed surface right there. That's probably made in the east coast of Italy in the area around Ravana. That's a very gritty, coarse-rich fabric. And so we break little pieces off of pliers. These aren't museum pieces. Roman pottery is mass-produced. And once we give this back to superintendents, it's going to be like the last scene and later is the lost arc where it just gets put in the storeroom and gets covered in mold and Lord knows what happens to it. We break little pieces off, glue them onto a note card, and then once you do label, I want you to do that you can blow through and you can take, you know, 50 to 100 of these photo micrographs in an hour. And they're very low quality. It's only about, I think, a 1.8 megapixel camera. But it's good enough. And it allows you to permanently document that and to open many of them at one time in Photoshop and put two side by side and say, yeah, these are the same. This one's different. Put it in another folder and avoid some of those very frustrating lumping and splitting problems that you get as an archaeologist when you're trying to define discrete pottery fabrics and assign things to them. So we do things like with our Italian Sajalata. We have three distinct fabrics we've been able to recognize. That's probably Arezzo. This is a Tiber Valley fabric. This has, you may pick up, it's got these flakes of mica in it. It has a little bit of volcanic material. I think that's probably Bay of Naples. I've also done a lot of ethnographic work with potters in Italy, so I know the clays pretty well. And so, for example, I've been able to show that there's a chemical match between this fine-bodied Italian Sajalata and this La Custron clay from just outside Arezzo where it presumably is being made. So that's the kind of thing I'm showing you there. For every fabric that we identify, we try to do at least one thin section so that we can use a somewhat bigger bat to describe the texture and also identify the mineral inclusions and rock fragment inclusions in it. What you see here is, again, if you knew Roman pottery mineralogy, you'd know exactly what this is. This is a classic fabric from the Bay of Naples area that's full of this volcanic sand from Mount Vesuvius. All of these green mineral grains are aujite or clino peroxine that look like little black grains of sand. It's often called black sand fabric. Big chunks of volcanic rock with plagioclase feldspar microlights in it. This is all classic, classic stuff. This is a type of cookware we have in small amounts on the site, which comes from the Bay of Naples. We're able to do a certain amount of a small program of chemical analysis. It turned out that, again, the site director is from the University of Illinois, the University of Illinois at that point had a Department of Nuclear Engineering, which had a NAA facility. Departments of Nuclear Engineering were always looking to do something that did not involve making weapons. Periodically, if you were lucky, as an archeologist, you'd be invited to do NAA. We were given authority to do four Lazy Susans worth of specimens, about 200 specimens. We worked up a program of study where we took all of that fine body regional pottery, which makes sense to study the chemistry of, because it's kind of got a high-level homogeneity in the fabric. We worked out a program of study where we've analyzed that, analyzed some local clays. We've been able to come up with some partitioning. Here you see a bivariate plot of hafnium versus cesium. That, for example, will give you divisions between hafnium is driven probably by the amount of quartz in pottery, hafnium is in zircons, and zircons are in quartz, so a grittier thing will tend to have elevated hafnium values. Cesium, on the other hand, occurs quite prominently in the regional volcanic mineral grains, and so if you have some of those in there, that's going to drive up the cesium somewhat, so that's what's driving the chemical partitioning. In terms of defining forms, we tend to try to, again, apply a systematic, technologically well-founded approach to this, to where we pay very careful attention to all surface micro-morphology. That is, by looking at the surfaces of vessels, you can make pretty good inferences about the actual steps that were involved in forming them. And so here I show you an example of an African sigilada sea, Hayes 52 bowl, and you can maybe pick up these facets on the outside where the lower wall was turned or potters might say trimmed. On the right I'm showing you just that operation being done by a potter, and over here is a little test thing I did myself that I threw and then turned it to look at the difference in the unturned area and the turned area, how it's compressed and things like that. And I was able to kind of do this sort of and take this kind of analysis, which I learned from scholars working at the University of Leiden where they had a department of pottery technology and then combine them with this article written by this guy named Lightfoot in the production step measure and do some useful stuff as I'll talk about. It's the first time I've ever heard of this guy, Lightfoot. So we do things like here's a particular Italian sigilada form. Over here is a sequence of the different steps involved in manufacturing it. Over here I've taken Harris Matrix composer software and tricked it to allow myself to compose this flow chart you see which takes us from the very beginning down to the firing to try to graph out what's involved in making this. Now different forms involved different numbers of steps, different amounts of labor input, different kinds of labor input, right? And that's what we're trying to understand and also to be able to use eventually to do maybe some different approaches to quantification. In terms of documenting pottery, Yane Ikehimo, my Finnish colleague came up with a great idea before everyone was doing this, we figured out how to use Adobe Illustrator to take our pencil drawings and convert them into finished inked drawings. And what we do is we simply now unless it's a special case, we simply draw the profile of the thing. We don't draw the exterior view. We put in lines to mark interior exterior details. So it's a lot less line drawing to do. You can get a lot more drawings than one sheet of paper. We scan them. We can add them into this little routine we have in Illustrator where Yane has already put in a dummy top line, middle line, interior detail, exterior detail. And then we can take those and convert the drawing that we've made into a finished drawing like you see up there on the right. That's what I have a lot of my Uwrap apprentices doing. But I always tell them you can't spell tedious without TED, right? So that's what we do. I have a lot of attention to use alterations to better understand that aspect of pottery. So here I show you a couple of joining sherds of African Sigilata D of a plate which has these quite spectacular cut marks in it, right? That's not so common actually. And on the left what I'm showing you is the rim of another African Sigilata D vessel which has broken and been repaired by putting a lead staple right through the wall. So you're looking at the back end of that staple. We have a little bit of evidence for the repair of pottery. We also see evidence for modification. Here's a couple of shots of transport amphoras. In the bottom you have one of these tube shaped Spathaea or K26s which commonly in the Roman world they'd knock the top off knock the bottom off and use them as a pipe or I've even seen a well headed oste that was built with these kind of like the way you build things out of Lincoln logs you know everyone remembers what Lincoln logs are so they were reused for that. On this side is the top of the K35 massive wide bodied oil amphora from Tunisia they've cut the top off and you can even see that they kind of had a pentimento. They chiseled a little line right along there to try to break it and then they decided for whatever reason to make it a little bit wider and broke it off further down. They were probably trying to get the body of this to use as a sarcophagus as a coffin for a body although they might have been trying to recover just the top to use as a funnel or sometimes we get punchy on Friday afternoons we use them as megaphones and things like that. Now quantification matters a lot because what we're trying to do of course is to map the supply of these food stuffs to Rome right to the center of the empire from various places in its periphery and so we quantify our materials by the four traditional measures number of sherds your weight of sherds then your estimated vessels represented which is basically a minimum number of individuals count like you know you sort things out by form and you identify you've got ten rim sherds and you can see that three of them are from the same vessel and two are from another vessel so you have so many different vessels right and you can work that out but as has been pointed out that actually that form of count actually has some quite strong biases built into it because if things tend to break into a lot of rim sherds and let's say you have a low level of recovery only ten percent of the vessel is going to be found vessels that tend to break into a lot of sherds are going to tend to have a sherd represented and be found ones that only broke into two sherds level low probability so it turns out in fact that while this seems like a very scrupulous way to quantify pot we're going to have certain positive attributes it also has some negative ones so we also do the estimated vessel equivalence count where for each of those specimens you put it on a diameter chart and you estimate what percentage of the vessel is there and then you sum those it turns out that that's invariant with variability and breakage rate and the presence of things and stuff like that so it's very labor intensive and has its own facets of error I should say it's tough to come up with a good measure but we do all of those we're also working on a couple of different quantitative methods that are our own first of all it seems pretty obvious looking at the lowest of the six here in the chart that counting Amphras is useful but really Amphras are packaging for a quantity of content and Amphras differ quite radically in their capacity from a low of about six liters to a high of sometimes as high as about 80 liters or something like that and so my friend, Victor Martinez in particular who is in charge of the Amphras side of things has been doing a lot of work where we recover profile drawings of transport Amphras from the literature so not our own because we almost never have them intact but then we have a CAD routine where you can convert this drawing into a three-dimensional solid and then you can calculate the capacity of that solid he's also doing a lot of work with issues about how full they were filled it turns out that's complicated but we're moving then towards that as an approach to be able to take our Amphra data recovered by the first four types and convert them to something more meaningful we also are looking at manufacturing cost although having made some claims about that several years ago I've kind of been less active in doing that but it's trying to build on things like Kent's production step measure and our evidence for the number of operations involved in making a form and the weight of a form because that's how much stuff is in it right and try to combine those in ways that will allow us to come up with different ways of quantifying the assemblage that will allow us to bring out some other points okay running out of time here so I guess I'll get to publication methods that as I started thinking about how we're really going to get all this stuff through to publication in recent years I realized that the traditional methods, the traditional brick and mortar way of publishing an archaeology is not a particularly good way to go for pottery in particular where you have massive amounts of low level data that are very expensive to put into a volume and so I made the decision to publish our basic data online I had sabbatical last year so I was able to take work that had been done by one of my URAP volunteers over several years but never really leading to closure to teach myself how to do basic Drupal website design and push that through and launched a lab website called Race Romani which will be the basic platform for presenting our data here is the page and time permitting or I see I'm running a bit long people want to stick around I'm linked online so I can show you into the website and show you how we're doing doing this stuff I think it's kind of interesting so this is the page for PEP the website is supported by the UC Berkeley digital humanities group so it's mounted on their server because Nico and I had a grant from them to do something I'll get to in just a second the plan is to permanently archive this stuff on the California digital library in their archive which Berkeley faculty are allowed to do so after I am gone, have been run over by a beer truck or whatever the PEP data can live on and the ultimate idea is to also publish a set of interpretive monograph, interpretive essays as a monograph through if it's accepted California classical studies which is a peer reviewed open access online monograph size publication initiative that's been begun by my colleague in classics Donald Mastronardi again is trying to take advantage of digital approaches to publication the last thing I'll mention and then I can open up the website for those who want to stick around and see it is that one element that we need to finish, I pretty much have the whole system for presenting the pottery in place and my idea is to use these modules as off-the-shelf tools that other projects could use to publish their data or modify as they choose to publish their data but one of the things we receive grant money for, Nico and I, was to create a data visualization tool to be driven by the Harris matrix people I assume know what a Harris matrix is and the idea is that we would by having a visualization tool written in JavaScript D3 and then with the Drupal module that will allow that to be actualized, we could allow a user to in effect surf our Harris matrix click on a stratigraphic unit and it would open the database for that unit in the Harris matrix I also would like to elaborate this too but I have like a drop-down menu of classes where you click on a class and it would activate all the stratigraphic units in which that class existed and very derelict in getting this done we've had all this ready to go for about two years now I guess and I'm hopeful that I've got some Iraq people who will allow me to get this in place and that's really the last element of the scheme that we need to do so I see I'm kind of reaching the end of my time this took longer than I thought but what I'll do is if people want to stick around I'll open up the Race Romani website and I can show you a bit about what we've got here looking so great one of the problems is that the template I'm using in Drupal is not the world's best template for example it's an optimized for handheld devices among other things but under this tab projects I have a page for three big research projects one is the Fatta Concreta which if you know what is telling is like a triple pun that's the ethnographic work that I've done in Italy and then I have the Palatani's Pottery project and then I have the project that I small project lead at Pompeii the Pompeii Artifact Life History project which has for example been supported by grants from the Stahl Fund this project that hasn't received any, haven't stalled money but the basic idea on for each of these projects and what's happened there here we go is to provide basic background and here you have a program of work so what we've done year by year authorization assistance and funding what it says a description of the site with some images and then I get down to the big nitty gritty which is actually presenting the data and below this which I think I can get down to or not sorry if I'm going to have trouble navigating this I also have well if I can't get to it what I have is additional pages for downloadable versions of everything that's in here the idea is that everything I have I'm happy to give away now what I'm doing is for each of these let me go back to my projects page here again so I'm not that familiar with this touchpad either under this part I have a very long methodological discussion so if you want to see exactly how we're doing everything for example how we define a rim is a rim which sounds clinton-esque but when you actually ask yourself on what basis do we call something a rim it winds up being more complicated than you would think and then we have class pages which are text documents linked to photo micrographs pottery drawings photo micrographs of thin sections in a traditional format if you want to know about a particular class of pottery where something like that you can go to that document which looks rather like a document you find in traditional publication except that it has these links to visual documentation and then I have a series of what I call databases and these are in fact spreadsheets which include all the data linked in all kinds of interesting ways that allow you to filter it and sort it and things of that sort and link again directly through to the documentation the graphic documentation and so it gives a level of flexibility and allows you to approach things in ways you might not be able to do so should I stop at this point and allow people to go because I think I'm coming around to one o'clock right? so maybe what I'll do is if people need to go or want to go you can visit race Romani though and you can navigate this at your leisure I'd point out in fact that under scholarly products which sounds pretentious but that's what they call things in Europe and I have various things that I am happy to give away so I have for example research tools here and there I have all kinds of things ranging from diameter charts to the frames that we drop our photo micrographs into to a 30 minute tutorial on how to do this routine for calculating Amphic capacities and Christine and I and some of our students talked about this a couple years ago so all that stuff is there if you want to cruise it you might find something interesting and feel free to make it your own and use it in some fashion and also look at our results so that's all I'll say if people want to stick around and talk about anything questions I'm happy to entertain them yeah Christine early on you were talking about the different sort of care contained Amphora and that the clay you're studying the clay and where these Amphora come from are you assuming that because that Amphora comes from a certain place that it's sending goods from that place or did those pots move around and pick up something somewhere else meaning when you get North African to Asian Amphora do you believe that North African to Asian oil oil etc. come paid in that that's a really important question you've asked the wrong person because I'm like that's one of the things I know a lot about so they just had a big conference in the University of Cady about two years ago about the term an Amphora capacity or I'm sorry Amphora content and I was the person they charged with giving the talk on just that topic and I've turned it into a proceedings article which I could send to you it's not out yet but the long and short of it is it's clear that Amphora's were pretty regularly reused for a variety of purposes our big nightmare would be if Amphora's were systematically reused as packaging containers say suppose that's the case you find a Tunisian oil Amphora on your site does that mean, does that reflect the consumption of Tunisian olive oil or Gallic wine or you don't know what and so far the evidence suggests that that was sometimes the case but probably very infrequently the case and our best evidence for that is finding cargoes and shipwrecks where we have evidence for preserved content and there's one Amphora in particular or one wreck from the Adriatic the so called Grado wreck where it's quite clear that they were systematically taking Amphora's from Tripolitania and Libya from Tunisia from the eastern Mediterranean Amphora's were probably for oil and wine and reusing them for the packaging of fish products and so the Grado wreck is this one like spectacular nightmare for an Amphora specialist but once you get beyond that there's some more evidence for this and very few shipwrecks have had their Amphora cargo systematically and carefully studied so it's not clear how represented that might be of some broader practice there's also a lot more work being done recently some by Alessandro Peci who's spent time at Berkeley I know that Rosemary Joyce knows Alessandro quite well she's Italian but a researcher at the University of Barcelona what might still be Spain and we're also now doing a lot of residue analysis which is allowing you to directly kind of test our ideas about what's in things or see that in fact multiple contents it's still kind of early days in that regard I must say but that's kind of this conference is organized because there's a lot of movement towards us being able to do better than we've been able to do about demonstrating what was the content in Amphora so to some extent they are being reused systematically packaging containers but the evidence we have at our command right now doesn't suggest that that was let's say a common practice but maybe it was common in certain times or certain parts of the Roman world you see so that there's much more for us to understand about this but the assumption that the presence of Tunisian Amphora in Rome means consumption of Tunisian foodstuffs is one we still make but we also understand that it's one that's problematic in certain regards so that's one, yeah Kent Is it rare to find that many of these Amphora in one context like in Rome? I mean it's just made this really unique in terms of your study or is it relatively common to find the context of how it's quite calm by the time you get into the imperial period that it's really important and I also just was at a conference on recycling in the Roman Oxford where they asked me to write the thing about recycling and so I've been giving some attention to this is that by the Roman imperial period we have from certain points of view a throw away society we have the mass production of ostensibly disposable packaging and consumption sites by the time you get into the Roman imperial period is not the least bit uncommon to have an Amphora pottery assembly which is dominated by so that's entirely common that was a couple of questions if there aren't any others go yeah thanks for your attendance