Rheinzabern Pottery Workshops
About
Terra sigillata from this Rhineland town would eventually reach markets from Britain to Crimea, fired in kilns hot enough to reach a thousand degrees Celsius. The great pottery works that made Rheinzabern's name as Tabernae did not begin until roughly 150 CE, more than three decades after Trajan's death. In 117 CE this stretch of the Rhine frontier had not yet become an industrial center.
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
- Itinerarium Antonini, Antonine Itinerary route Argentoratum–Mogontiacum, station 'Tabernis'
Lists 'Tabernis' as a station 13 Roman miles from Saletio and 11 from Noviomagus on the Rhine valley road — the waystation that grew into the great terra-sigillata-producing town of Rheinzabern.
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 →