Saint-Bézard Pottery and Wine Estate
About
An Italian settler from the Bay of Naples named Quintus Iulius Priscus founded this combined wine estate and pottery works in the Hérault valley at the start of the 1st century CE. Its kilns fired several Gaulish amphora types, Gauloise 4, 7, and 9 among them, while the estate's own vineyards supplied the wine those jars carried to market. A colonnaded courtyard villa of some twenty-five hundred square meters anchored the complex, still working when Trajan died in 117 CE.
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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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 →