Byzantine Everyday Material Culture

The ceramics of the EB era are still being slowly understood and remain largely unrecognized. Amongst forms now assignable are the handmade “Slavic Wares,” locally produced and found in many sites in Greece, seemingly both an indigenous replacement for the general disappearance of local industrial products and also produced by genuine Slav settlers from outside the Balkans (Color Plate 17.1). They date from the sixth to seventh centuries for undecorated hand-made varieties, then comes a decorated (incised linear and wavy-lines designs), wheel-made series in the eighth and ninth centuries. These were used both for cooking and as tablewares. Other wares reflect a clearer development as sub-Roman ceramics (Armstrong 2009, Vionis et al. 2009), such as Red-PaintedWare manufactured on Crete during the seventh and eighth centuries, originating out of the LR tradition of Red-Slip Ware of the sixth to the seventh centuries in the Aegean (Color Plate 17.1). Recent research indicates that Red-Slip wares are also still being made locally into the 8th century. Constantinople White Ware (named from its fabric), is a yellow-green pioneer glazed ware found rarely in the EB provinces. Pamela Armstrong has argued that although White Wares are already common in the capital from the seventh century, they spread widely in the ninth and tenth centuries, reflecting both the recovery ofByzantine power over the Aegean and also the desire of provincial populations to acquire exotic tableware from the cultural center of their civilization (Armstrong 2001).

Transitional amphorae types of globular form from the seventh to ninth centuries have been identified across the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean in recent years, especially the Sarachane 35 amphora. Shapes show continuity from Late Roman forms into the Early Byzantine period in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the wide spread of such transport wares indicates that maritime commerce did not cease during the “Dark Ages.”

With the Middle Byzantine era the ceramic assemblage becomes much clearer. In tablewares the commonest types (shown in Color Plate 17.1) are

(1)  Green and Brown Painted Ware (maybe Persian-influenced), eleventh to early thirteenth centuries;

(2)  Early Sgraffito (incised) Ware (Islamic-influenced), eleventh and twelfth centuries; and (3) Slip-Painted Ware, eleventh century to Modern era. These wares are normally covered with a clear or colored lead-glaze to protect their surfaces and assist cleaning and impermeability. But even in provincial trading towns such as Corinth, such glazed wares are less than 1 percent of the weight of excavated pottery in the tenth and eleventh centuries, then rise gradually to 20 percent in the thirteenth century (Sanders 2003). Nonetheless, although the vast bulk of glazed tableware was made regionally, the burgeoning commerce of the late MB and LB Aegean, even if increasingly in Italian hands, was moving tableware as well as the more predictable oil and wine amphorae around the coastlands, as the twelfth-century Alonissos shipwreck underlines (Papanikola-Bakirtzi et al. 1999). Byzantine plain wares, for food preparation and serving, and for cooking, have been published by Bakirtzis (1989).

We shall cover LB ceramics in Chapter 19. One other artifact can at times shed important light on Byzantine society, lead seals (Polychronaki 2005). They were used to guarantee the confidentiality of correspondence, authenticating the author and also used to seal merchandise. As official archives are almost all lost, lead seals can shed light on state mechanisms, as its administration required a constant exchange of letters.