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Richmond (1950) in a paper considering the archaeological record for religion makes the perceptive comment that we run the risk of saddling the dead with views which they would have regarded as at best faintly alien, at worst positively distasteful. Freedom in the Classical World, just as it was to Southern Plantation owners was freedom to enslave, the 'freedom' to remove others' 'freedom'. Attached to this was a poor opinion of other cultural groups, those who did not deserve the freedom which 'civilisation', as defined by those providing the definitions, brings. This is not a purely Classical concept, and there are hints of it in myths earlier than Homer. From the perspective of Amarna, the barbarians on the edge of the world, not even using the common diplomatic language of Akkadian, would have been the Greeks, using this term to encompass both Minoans and Myceneans.
How does this cascade down to pots, potters and archaeological interpretation? The English, from their small, pre-
Tesconian, corner shop perspective, and Americans, Wallmartian in their right to bear arms and kill in the name of '
freedom', see the ceramic past in terms of Independent People, free potters able to move, take resources, and freely
market aesthetically pleasing, a thought which might also be anachronistic when applied to pre-Classical societies,
and/or utilitarian products. This barely impinges on reality, for whilst potters might be itinerant, not directly
tied to a single owner, survival depended upon being granted access to resources, clay, temper and fuel at the very
least. In exchange a product was demanded, whose form was largely constrained by the market, individual or group.
The concept of freedom, more correctly Thomas Paine than Adam Smith, grew out of the Enlightenment, and in the modern
sense would have been one of those alien concepts hinted at by Richmond. A more realist view is provided by Bob Dylan,
'everybody gotta serve somebody', if not, then Hobbs is more appropriate in making life, nasty, brutish and short.
Potters have rarely had status in society; potting like many other trades, is the pursuit of the landless, a sideline
of iron smelters (as opposed to smiths), or those whose land, usually not their own but occupied by some sort of ill
defined tenancy from some one higher in the chain of command, was insufficiently productive. The English have a
tendency to confuse owners with potters. The individuals who made the pots, objects of high aesthetic value to some,
but utilitarian to many if not most contemporaries, had little status, and on Classical evidence were often slaves or
freedmen, not independent entrepreneurs, if that term in itself is not anachronistic. In the case of the curiosity of
vessels stamped with names, like first and second century mortaria in Britain and Northern Gaul, it is most unlikely
that the name is that of the potter, as opposed to the owner in whatever capacity. Would a Roman citizen, like Gaius
Attius Marinus, a name stamped across the rim of mortaria during the late 1st century have been the potter, when other
citizens were clearly the owners of entire establishments? In Ralph Jackson's Epilogue to Hugh Thompson's (2003)
recent book on the archaeological evidence for Greek and Roman slavery, he accepts a figure of 1 in 3 for the ratio
of slaves to free people in Late Republican Italy. It is also salutary to note that even in the late fourth century,
the Christian lady Melania is recorded as owning 20,000 slaves and land from Egypt to England; perhaps there might
have been an estate potter or two in there? It should also be noted that she saw no contradiction in this denial of
freedom to so many. Gaius, or for that matter Sarrius (see Buckland et al. 2001), is likely to have been as close to
actual potting as Josiah Wedgwood in his Shropshire mansion was to his employees in the slums of Stoke; despite
raising the status of ceramics briefly with his Neoclassical finewares, be fore cascading it down to all and sundry by
mass production, he would have preferred to have eaten from silver with a little Chinese porcelain.
Two Obols for Attic Red Figure or two Asses for Arretine? Only where their rarity value, as in Gaul, merited it.
The preferences were for metal, which is why lowly potters sought to mass produce cheap imitations, and even this begs
the question as to whether potters were free to make the decision what to produce, and which clays and tempers to make
it from. Potters have rarely had the status to be innovators, although metal workers often did. Maybe briefly in the
Late Neolithic, between making cheap imitations of basketwork and the wider availability of metal, might potters have
raised themselves above the level of failed cultivator or hunter. The idea that they were important to society is
entirely a creation of the archaeologist and art historian, and at least the latter might have an excuse. Prehistory and protohistory
is an alien landscape where the norms of Polite Society do not exist.
An undercurrent in much archaeological thinking is that the production of the aesthetically pleasing is intimately linked with freedom to express, a sort of inane liberalism, again part of the trappings of an Enlightenment perception of Antiquity. Setting aside the fact that one man's beauty is another's utilitarian, slaves or prisoners with no incentive may produce the beautiful - the ship models made out of bone food debris by the French prisoners at Normans Cross provides a good example. If survival at the margins necessitates production of the aesthetically pleasing then social Darwinism dictates that it will happen.
The whole problem of pottery production is tied up with another more fundamental one, and that is, who owns the land? In that pristine Childean world of the hunter gatherer, each unit knew its territorial limits and to transgress meant death. As the landscape filled with cultivators possession became more important. Access to materials was not a right, but a negotiated agreement, either with a unit or increasingly with the dominant individual. Access to clay, temper, and perhaps more contentiously fuel, constrained activity. By a late example, why did the mid-second century 'potter' Sarrius only set up a subsidiary production site at Rossington Bridge from Mancetter, rather than move closer to his new more northerly markets along the Antonine Wall? Simply because he only was able to negotiate movement within his civitas. His pots crossed boundaries but his firm did not. Should this model be applied to the Aegean, or was it some sort of bastard cross between Adam Smith and Karl Marx? If Aegean archaeology was less dominated by its ceramics, then it might be. Linear B does not talk about freedom, it talks about tax, the reason why writing was invented in the first place. Tax is never freely given, taken by those who have the monopoly on violence; potters were not high in this hierarchy, just very small bricks in the wall.
Bibliography
Buckland, P. C., Hartley, K. F. & Rigby, V. (2001). The Roman Pottery Industry at Rossington Bridge: Excavations 1956-61. Journal of Roman Pottery Studies 9.
Richmond, I. A. (1950). Archaeology and the after-life in pagan and Christian imagery. Oxford, University of Durham Ridell Memorial Lecture, Oxford University Press.(57pp).
Thompson, F. H. (2003). The archaeology of Greek and Roman slavery. London, Duckworth.
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