Corneilhan Amphora Workshop
About
Potters at Corneilhan near Beziers fired Gauloise 3 wine amphorae holding roughly thirty liters apiece, part of the wave of workshops that sprang up across Narbonensis to bottle its booming wine export trade. The workshop, known locally as La Teularie, turned out tile and coarse domestic ware alongside its amphorae from one riverside site in the Herault valley. Its position just off the Via Domitia gave it easy overland distribution.
What happened here
The workshop runs as a production line. Clay is dug locally, weathered over winter, kneaded and thrown, or pressed into moulds for the decorated wares. Vessels are dried under cover, stamped with the potter's name, stacked in the kiln around a central flue and fired for days with the temperature judged by eye and by test pieces pulled from a port in the side. A big firing holds tens of thousands of pots and a bad one loses the lot. Wasters are dumped in heaps beside the works. Some workshops export across half the empire and their stamps turn up thousands of miles away. Fuel is the limit on everything, so kilns sit near woodland and move when it runs out.
Sources
Nearby
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