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A Parthian Shot - Uhuru?

by Paul Buckland

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.

Name of author (biography)

Paul Buckland previously taught at the University of Sheffield; he now works in
Bournemouth.

© Buckland 2004
© assemblage 2004