Velaux Amphora Workshops
About
Potters on the Arc river at Velaux ran a cluster of five workshops making wine amphorae for the lower Rhone valley, the largest kiln site alone covering fifty by seventy-five meters along the riverbank. They specialized in Gauloise 2 and Gauloise 5 jars that carried Provencal wine across the western Mediterranean through the first and second centuries. Their riverside position let workshop owners load finished amphorae straight onto barges bound for the coast.
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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