Pisa Fine-Ware Workshops
About
As Arretium's sigillata boom faded after Augustus, this Tuscan port city inherited much of the trade, becoming the leading Italian source of glossy red-slip tableware through the 1st century CE. Chemical testing of pottery from the Roman base at Haltern in Germany traced fully thirty percent of its fine ware to Pisan workshops, three times what came from Arezzo. Potters here worked the same industrial molded-relief tradition, just shifted downriver to a busier port.
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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