La Graufesenque Pottery Workshops
About
A single kiln at this Gallic pottery town could fire forty thousand vessels at once, making Condatomagus the largest ceramics factory the Roman world ever built. Terra sigillata stamped here has turned up as far away as Britain and the Danube frontier. By 117 CE the workshops had passed their peak, with the rival center at Lezoux drawing away trade, but production continued for decades more.
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.
In ancient writing
- Anonymous, Firing-list graffiti, La Graufesenque workshop R. Marichal, Les graffites de La Graufesenque, Gallia Supplément 47 (1988), ~250 texts
Potters scratched bilingual Latin-and-Gaulish tallies onto unfired dishes before each kiln load, naming vessel types and counting them with native Gaulish numerals — cintus, allos, tritios, petuarios — the single richest surviving body of written Gaulish.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →