The Ceramic Assemblage

Classical pottery assemblages are rich in forms, although many of the dominant shapes are also found in Archaic and Hellenistic times. This means that many of the finds from surveys or excavations cannot be securely pinned down to particular centuries, and there is a tendency to squeeze sherds which could be Classical into the fifth to fourth centuries, making the periods either side appear problematically impoverished. We touched on the main types of figured tableware in Chapter 10. Although it is now clear that red-figure tablewares were not expensive, we lack reliable statistics to clarify how far down the social scale they were in use, although Lohmann (1993b) suggests they are confined to a minority of rural farm sites in comparison to wider use in the city. The importance of formal drinking at all levels of society is emphasized by the major proportion of cups and kraters (jars for mixing wine and water) in typical assemblages. There is an explosion of their production in Greece from the mid-sixth century BC, although their use included ritual, festivals, symposia, and more private home-use. In comparison to Hellenistic and Roman times, amphorae appear less frequently, which implies that long-distance export of bulky food products was at a lower scale, and local consumption dominant. Nonetheless recorded prices place wine-amphorae and honey at modern semi-luxury levels, compared to oil and cereals and figure-painted pottery. The high occurrence of ceramic beehives on town and rural sites is thus not surprising. We noted in Chapter 8 that giant storage-vessels (pithoi) were expensive although useful for decades. Our assemblage illustrated in Figure 11.4 presents the everyday household wares, minus the fine tablewares and large pithoi.