Mobilities of Potters and Pot Painters in Ancient Mediterranean: The Test Cases of Classical Athens and Southern Italy

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Movements of artists and artisans was a common phenomenon in Eastern Mediterranean both in prehistoric and historical times, with sculptors and wall painters being the most frequently mentioned in ancient texts. The mobility of makers of figured ceramics in Classical Athens and in Southern Italy has often been posited based on stylistic affinities, but not demonstrated convincingly. Our focus on how mobilities operated in Southern Italy allows us to examine a dynamic area which experienced intraregional and interregional mobility of local artists and possible relocation of Athenian pot-painters.

Our four-prong interdisciplinary approach includes geographical and urban landscapes (with distribution data), visual landscapes (with stylistic and iconographic analysis), and networks landscapes (with SNA investigation of the role of seminal craft agents in the red-figure vase industry). We investigate how these different ‘landscapes’ impacted the potters and pot-painters as they adjusted to local ceramic ecologies for shape, slips, iconography, and workshop organization. We critically revisit notions of mobilities of objects (import/export) which sometimes may be better explained as mobilities of artisans emigrating from other geographical areas and relocating in a new production center. We aim to sharpen the archaeological indicators to discern whether potters, painters or pots moved in antiquity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37074.0