Dolia or large globular, sometimes egg- or strawberry-shaped earthenware vessels are perhaps one of the most fascinating pottery types in the Roman world. Long considered a rather generic type of coarseware for general food storage, with little or no change over time in shape and manufacturing practices, their important role in agricultural production and storage—especially for the wine and olive oil business—has received much more attention in recent years.[1] Caroline Cheung’s debut monograph now adds to this growing line of scholarship with a first-time panoramic account of the life cycle and role of dolia in the Roman Mediterranean. Such a focus volume is timely, and overall Cheung succeeds in demonstrating the major significance of dolia in both rural and urban storage, as well as the technical achievements of its manufacturing industry, but in the end imperfections in data analysis and interpretation prevent Cheung’s book from becoming the new reference work that it so clearly wants to be.
Cheung’s opus, in fact, works best when dealing with the technicalities and life-cycle aspects of dolia use in the Roman world. Her discussions of the delicate and often specialist production process (Chapter 2, pp. 24-33), and of the widely attested phenomena of repairing (Chapter 7, pp. 144-172) and reusing (Chapter 8, pp. 174-179), constitute some of the most rewarding sections of the book. By combining archaeological and ancient literary evidence with ethnographic data and insights from traditional dolium-like vessels—such as Greek pithoi, Spanish tinajas, Portuguese talhas, Georgian qvevri and Korean onggi—Cheung expertly shows the challenges of making and baking big dolia, and the great skill needed to obtain perfect clay mixtures and good quality vessels, turning their fabrication into a proper specialist craft. This also explains the costly nature of these large vessels, and so their key value for their owners, who went a long way to repair and reuse them, before they eventually fell out of fashion in the 2nd-3rd centuries AD.
Given Cheung’s illuminating use of comparative data on large clay jars in these sections, the wider historical setting in which she initially frames the Roman dolia phenomenon causes genuine surprise. Cheung, in fact, is so keen to make dolia one of the major accomplishments of Roman artisans, that she starts her treatise with an—in my view—forced and unnecessary distinction between Roman vessels and earlier large ceramic jars for food storage in the Mediterranean, in the first-place pithoi (Chapter 1, p. 5). Yes, dolia were often different in terms of shape and size, and yes, in the Roman world they were mostly used for storing wine and olive oil (the main focus of Cheung’s book), but these aspects do not impede them from still being part of a millennia-old tradition in the ancient world to store and preserve a broad array of foodstuffs. Within the context of winemaking, such vessels were a common feature of many wine cellars for fermenting, maturing and aging wine in several areas of the Mediterranean and Western Asia, from the Early Neolithic (6000—-5800 BC), to Late Antiquity (3rd-4th century AD), across the Bronze, Iron and Roman Ages.[2] While a massive increase in scale of production in Roman times cannot be denied—with many storage rooms across Italy, France and Spain housing hundreds of dolia with capacities ranging between 500 and 1500 liters (and sometimes higher)—earlier evidence for cellars with comparably big vessels exists. This includes the 4th--3rd-century BC farm at Komboloi in Greece (pithoi of 2,000 liters and more), or the contemporary wine cellar at Tsikhiagora in Georgia (qvevri of > 600 liters), but also the many palaces of the Urartu Kingdom in the Armenian highlands (9th--7th- century BC), with wine cellars filled with pithoi of up to 1,750 liters.[3] This hints not at a proper ‘invention’ of such large vessels by Roman potters, but rather at a long and sustained tradition of clay jar-making for wine production, of which Roman dolia were the pinnacle in antiquity.
In her study proper of Roman dolium storage technology, Cheung develops three main lines of research: 1) the use of dolia on rural farms and estates for storing wine (and olive oil in Italy, Gaul and the Iberian Peninsula) (chapters 3, 5); 2) the place of dolia in urban storage and retail in Cosa, Pompeii, Rome and Ostia (chapter 6); and 3) transport dolia used for the bulk trade of wine in ships (chapter 4). Cheung’s own earlier work has dealt mostly with the urban dolia evidence in Italy[4] and this is clearly reflected in her detailed and expertly discussion of the data also in this book. This results in an insightful analysis, revealing important evolutions in technology and dimensions between the 2nd century BC and the 1st century AD (chapter 1, pp. 31-49), notable differences in dolium use and their architectural setting in-between towns—compare, e.g., Pompeii’s network of smallish wineries, shops and bars housing a variety of globular and cylindrical jars of ca. 500-550 liters with Rome’s and Ostia’s giant urban warehouses filled with large 1,000-liter strawberry-shaped dolia (pp. 134-135)—and a deep embedding in wider commercial and provisioning networks. These sections make up another highlight of the book.
In contrast, Cheung shows less mastery of the rural dolium data, fostering arguments and reconstructions that are sometimes less convincing. There exists of course a massive and diverse amount of evidence for the use of dolia and other large ceramic vessels in wine (and perhaps also olive oil) storage in the Roman countryside, across Italy, Gaul and the Iberian Peninsula, and for the most part it simply proves difficult to do this evidence justice within her broad treatment of the dolium phenomenon. But there are also some interpretative caveats. For example, Cheung firmly links the arrival of, and increase in, dolia wine cellars in Italy with the rise of Italian estate owners and merchants capable of selling and trading massive amounts of wine from the 2nd century BC onwards, often to faraway places and with big profits. This evolution is well attested in the Late Republican amphora evidence, mainly via the spread of the Tyrrhenian Dressel 1 and the Adriatic Lamboglia 2 (pp. 65-69). Recent work, however, has shown that the archaeological record does not unequivocally support such direct links. While the installation of dolia cellars surely went hand in hand with the building of large villas equipped with wine presses across central Italy, this seems mostly a development of the second half of the 1st century BC and later. Earlier indications for storage rooms with dolia exist, mainly in the suburbium of Rome, but none of the available evidence is conclusive and in no way suggests a widespread and systematic use of semi-buried clay jars in wine cellars before the mid-1st century BC.[5] Still, the peak in the wine amphora evidence for export occurs earlier, between the mid-2nd century BC and the mid-1st century BC, thus mostly predating the dolia installations.[6] This makes the connection between large-scale wine export and the building of dolia wine cellars in Italy much less straightforward, and a matter in need of further interrogation.
As a kind of transition between the Italian and Gaulish-Spanish evidence, Cheung also scrutinizes the fascinating case of dolia shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. Despite the undeniable relevance of these wine tankers, carrying purposely installed dolia with huge capacities of up to 2,000-3,000 liters, Cheung perhaps overstates their importance in her eagerness to make them fully part of her Roman wine narrative. Indeed, based on current knowledge, these ships were quite a restricted phenomenon, operating from the late 1st century BC to the middle to late 1st century AD almost exclusively between western central Italy and southern Gaul, and most likely controlled by only a few business families around Minturnae, such as the well-known gens Pirana.[7] It thus remains difficult to consider dolia ships——as a major advance in transport technology and a crucial passage for the dissemination of dolium storage technology to the west—as argued here by Cheung—given that they are represented in the archaeological record by only a handful of wrecks (pp. 97-100).
With a chapter (8) on the multi-layered cause for the lesser use of dolia towards the end of the 2nd century AD, and their widespread abandonment by the 3rd century AD, Cheung ends on a higher note. She cites the inevitable socio-cultural developments of a deeply changing world, but she also puts forward stimulating technical and production-related arguments, such as the constant need for attention and maintenance to prevent contamination and ruined liquids (pp. 173-175), or the high risk of cracking and breaking (pp. 178-179), all of which eventually may have encouraged dolium owners to look for alternatives that were easier to maintain. But the main reason for the shift probably lies within wider changes in western Roman containerization, such as the partial shift from pointy to flat-bottomed amphorae, and above all the increasing use of wooden barrels in storage and transport (pp. 183-196). Barrels had some important advantages over dolia—, including shorter and less weather-dependent production cycles (pp. 191-192), and the combination of enormous capacities (up to 1,000 liters) with a greater vessel portability, and this undoubtedly made them attractive wine carriers, especially in temperate central and northern Europe, where forests provided ample wood.[8] Still, there is archaeological and literary evidence to suggest that this originally Celtic tradition also took the ground in some areas of the Mediterranean—most notably the Iberian Peninsula, southern Gaul and northern Adriatic Italy—for the storage of wine in the 2nd-3rd centuries AD, first in combination with dolia and later as standalone replacements.[9] The entire process remains poorly documented and understood, but Cheung’s fresh analysis suggests important commercial motives behind this major turning point in the Roman wine industry. This possibly entailed the making of low-quality mass wines distributed in wooden barrels, whose leaky and porous nature now allowed for fermentation during transport without the risk of bursting the container (in contrast to sealed dolia and amphorae) (p. 184).
There are two handy appendices. The first includes tables with dimensions, capacities and stamps of the studied dolia from Cosa, Pompeii and Ostia, a list of dolium production sites in west-central Italy, a list of villas and farms with dolia, and volume incisions and indications for dolia repair (pp. 215-243). The second contains a description of select dolia from the discussion (pp. 245-254). The bibliography is extensive and representative, while the nice set of color plates adds to the comprehension of the text. A distribution map with all sites discussed is, alas, lacking.
Cheung has delivered a welcome addition to the burgeoning field of dolium studies. Yet despite providing a wealth of useful data and insights across nine chapters, the book ultimately suffers a bit from its interpretative weaknesses, its repetitive focus on dolium sizes and capacities, and multi-directional approach. Each of Cheung’s explorations of rural, urban and transport dolia works relatively well when considered independently, but she struggles to connect these essentially different socio-economic realities into a single Roman wine narrative.
Notes
[1] See, e.g., Caratto, C. 2017. Le dolium en Gaule Narbonnaise (Ier a.C.-IIIe S.p.C.): Contribution à l’histoire socio-économique de la Méditerranée nord-occidentale. Mémoires 46. Bordeaux: Ausonius Edition; and Salido Domínquez, J. 2017. “Los dolia en Hispana: Caracterización, funcionalidad y tipologia.’ In C. Fernández Ochoa, Á. Morillo Cerdán and M. del Mar Zarzalejos Prieto (eds.), Manual de cerámica romana III: Cerámicas romanas de época altoimperial III: Céramica común de mesa, cocina e almacenaje, imitaciones hispanas de series romanas, otras producciones? Madrid: Museo Arqueológico de la comunidad de Madrid: 239-309.
[2] As also suggested by recent comparative work in Van Limbergen, D. and P. Komar 2024. “Making wine in earthenware vessels: a comparative approach to Roman vinification.” Antiquity 98 (397): 85-101.
[3] Margaritis, E. 2016. “Agricultural production and domestic activities in rural Hellenistic Greece.” In E.M. Harris, D.M. Lewis and M. Woolmer (eds.), The Ancient Greek Economy. Markets, Households and City-States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 187-203; Isikli, M. and O. Aras 2022. “Observations on the Urartian Economy in Light of the Excavations at Ayanis Castle.” In M. Isikli (ed.), The Economic Structure of Eastern Anatolian Highland from Urartian Period to the End of Late Antiquity. Heidelberg: Propylaeum: 11-23; Rova, E. 2024. “The Archaeology of Wine in the Southern Caucasus. New Methods for an Old Tradition.” Antichistica 40 (10): 103-122.
[4] E.g., Cheung, C. 2020. “Managing Food Storage in the Roman Empire.” Quaternary International 597: 63-75; Cheung, C. 2021. “Precious Pots: Making and Repairing Dolia.” In H. Hochscheid and B. Russell (eds.), The Value of Making: Theory and Practice in Ancient Craft Production. Turnhout: Brepols: 171-188.
[5] The often-cited 5th-century BC example of the Villa dell’Auditorium is a case in point (e.g., Van Oyen, A. 2020. The Socio-economics of Roman Storage: Agriculture, Trade, and Family. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: Feige, M. 2022. Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsanlagen römischer Villen im republikanischen und kaiserzeitlichen Italien. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter).
[6] E.g., Van Limbergen, D. 2019. “Vinum Picenum and Oliva Picena II. Further Thoughts on Wine and Oil Presses in Central Adriatic Italy.” BABesch 94: 97-126.
[7] Rice, C. 2016. “Shipwreck cargoes in the western Mediterranean and the organization of Roman maritime trade.” JRA 29: 165-192; Carroll, M. 2025. “Making, Marketing and Moving dolia defossa around Italy.” In Van Limbergen, D. et al. (eds.), Vine-growing and winemaking in the Roman world: new data and original perspectives. Leuven: Peeters: 105-120.
[8]Sands, R. and E. Marlière 2020. “Produce, Repair, Reuse, Adapt and Recycle: The Multiple Biographies of a Roman Barrel.” European Journal of Archaeology 23 (3): 356-380.
[9] Brun, J.P. 2004. Archéologie du vin et de l’huile dans l’Empire romain. Paris: Errance; 2005. Archéologie du vin et de l’huile en Gaule romaine. Paris: Errance.