[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
This slim volume was published in conjunction with the recent congress of the Rei Cretariae Romanae Fautores, which took place in September 2024 in Leiden.[1] The editors, who were also the organizing committee of the congress, intended to provide attendees with a current and systematic overview of Roman pottery research in the Netherlands and adjacent areas.[2] The ten papers are divided into sections, one on the history of collecting Roman pottery and the role of the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities and the second on how the forms, decoration and production techniques of handmade pottery with a long Iron Age history changed with the coming of the Roman army and how it intersects with the introduction of wheelmade ceramics in the Augustan period. The third section discusses ceramics from urban sites, military assemblages, rural settlements and funerary contexts (cremations) from all of them, and the fourth looks in particular at the supply of two important imports, Gallo-Belgic ware and amphoras from Spain and southern France (as well as their local derivatives). The volume is richly illustrated throughout with color photographs, profile drawings, and excellent maps, all executed to the same high standard; they add enormously to the utility of the book.[3]
As the editors observe, as a result of the Valletta Convention of the Council of Europe the number of archaeological investigations in the Netherlands was more than ten times greater in 2022 than in the mid 1990s. The bibliography reflects this increase: of some 150 publications before 1999, three quarters span the century between 1890 and 1991 and one quarter date between the early 1990s and 1999. The remaining entries in the 20-page bibliography have been published between 2000 and 2024 or are in press. In the face of such an explosion of publication, much of it primary research, the syntheses offered by the papers in Roman Pottery in the Low Countries are a very welcome starting point.
The introduction, focused on the history of excavation, and the chapter on the Dutch National Museum’s collections together give a good overview of the history of Roman archaeology in the Netherlands. As in other European countries collectors seeking to illustrate the Classical sources in which they were trained were the initial impetus behind the formation of collections. Among the earliest to reach the National Museum were lithographs of the 1828 terra sigillata finds from Forum Hadriani and the records of thousands of terra sigillata sherds found at Vechten (1867-1870). From the beginning of the 20th century typological studies based on excavated pottery came to the fore, although many of them seem to have been restricted to a single functional group rather than to complete assemblages. After the mid-20th-century the leading role of the National Museum was taken over by a government department and academic research flourished. This, and eventually the Valletta Treaty, has led to much more research (academic, institutional, and corporate), more systematic and standardized research and reporting, more outreach, and also the ability to expand Roman pottery research into areas that rely on laboratory methods, thus into pottery production techniques and the study of fabrics.
In a 2000-word review I cannot discuss the papers in detail so I will highlight some that struck me particularly. For anyone who works in the Mediterranean, the northern edge of the continent is a different world where Roman history begins in 19-16 BC: until the later 2nd century most pottery was handmade rather than wheelthrown, and it is thought to have been produced by women working at home (but see below); presumably the existence of local workshops near some sites in the 2nd and 3rd centuries attests more specialized (wheel-thrown?) production and the possibility of exchange networks. The kinds of sites are different (camps and other military sites, rural settlements including terps, but few urban settlements); without mudbrick and in the Rhine delta where elevations are low or even below sea level there is little soil accumulation. In almost every paper the quantity and preservation of the pottery are striking; whereas in the Mediterranean I am used to dealing with hundreds and thousands of sherds in Roman contexts, along the lower Rhine the numbers from all kinds of contexts seem to be much smaller. Imports, even from Cologne or the coast, occur in much smaller numbers than in the Mediterranean, reflecting the difference between the size of sea-going vessels vs. river barges as well as the distances they could travel without transshipping their cargoes. What was an everyday commodity in the Mediterranean became a luxury good or simply unattainable in the north; olive oil would be a good example. This is a reminder that other foods and materials were different: tallow instead of oil for lamps and cooking, salt for preservation, lots more wood for barrels, plates, and cups (and houses), as well as the glass and metal vessels that supplemented Mediterranean ceramic assemblages.
I was initially puzzled by the chronological range in some papers. Van den Broeke’s paper on the transition from the Iron Age to the Roman period, i.e., the Augustan period, discusses native pottery introduced from north of the Rhine rather than pottery brought by the Roman military, and thus seems to have little to do with the Romans, particularly if the handmade pottery he discusses was a household product. It is, however, balanced by van Enckevort’s paper on Augustan military pottery at Nijmegen. Furthermore, subsequent papers make it clear that handmade pottery is fundamental to understanding Dutch sites of the first three centuries after Christ. For the information of those like me who know nothing about it, Deru’s paper on Gallo Belgic terra rubra and terra nigra was limited to the pre-Flavian period because that is the date of production of these imported wares. I wonder if the admirably set-out paper of Reigersman-van Lidth de Jeude on funerary pottery and ritual does not extend beyond the mid 3rd century because its chronology has not been adjusted to include the late 3rd/early 4th century as outlined in the previous paper by Geerts? Otherwise there seems to be no explanation why so many of the Roman cemeteries under investigation end in the mid-3rd century; the descriptions of wares and forms on pp. 106 and 119 are very similar. Three papers (Taayke, Liesen, Geerts) address the whole of the Roman period, from the first late Iron Age changes in the second half of the 1st century BC to the 4th and 5th centuries.
Finally, I was intrigued by several discussions or mentions of sea-salt containers, which seem to offer insight on trade, and possibly also on workshop rather than domestic production of handmade pottery. Handmade sea-salt containers from the North Sea coast are in a soft, pinkish or white fabric, first in a bowl form (2nd century BC to mid 1st century AD) and later in a cylindrical form (van der Broeke pp. 42-44, fig. 6.22-24) and in a harder, darker orange fabric as a footless, cylindrical vessel (fig. 6.25) from the English Channel (the coast of Gaul?) from the Augustan-Tiberian period (see van Enckevort, p. 96, from Nijmegen = the vessel shown in van der Broeke, fig. 6.25). Although the Rhine delta was a salt-production area in the late Iron Age, both the pink fabric cylindrical containers and the hard fabric vessels are said to come from the territory of the Menapii (south of the Scheldt estuary). Are they or some of them the handmade pottery from the Menapian region mentioned by Liesen (p. 84). And what are salt containers in briquetage?
As should be apparent from these remarks, my criticisms of these papers largely have to do with my lack of knowledge of the Roman pottery of the Netherlands. They are admittedly nitpicky, and they could largely have been avoided by some cross-referencing among the papers.
Authors and Titles
Part 1. Histories of Collecting
Roman Pottery and the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities: a Long-Term Relationship (Jasper de Bruin)
Part 2. The Social, Cultural, and Economic Meaning of Ceramic Change
From the Iron Age to the Roman Period. Native Pottery in the Batavian Area (Peter W. van den Broeke)
Meanwhile, in the North. . . Handmade Pottery beyond the Roman Frontier (Ernst Taayke)
A Cherished Material. Terra sigillata from the Province of Groningen (Annet Nieuwhof)
Part 3. Roman Pottery in Different Cultural and Functional contexts
Ceramics in the Urban Sphere: the Social Strata of their Users (Bernd Liesen)
Augustan Military Pottery Assemblages on the Hunerberg in Nijmegen (Harry van Enckevort)
Pottery from Rural Settlements in the Civitas Cananefatium (Roderick Geerts)
Developments in Funerary Pottery between Rhine and Meuse (1st-3rd Century) (W. Frederique Reigersman-van Lidth de Jeude)
Part 4. Geographical and Chronological Dimensions of Regional and Long-Distance Exchange
Gallo-Belgic Ware from Xanten to the Sea (Xavier Dreu)
Roman Amphorae on the Limes (Joost J. H. van den Berg)
Conclusion and Outlook (Roderick Geerts and Philip Bes)
Notes
[1] The Fautores are a group of archaeologists conducting research on Roman pottery found all over the former Roman empire and its margins; their interests range from the production of vessels to pottery as an index of commercial exchange and of cultural and social interactions. I am a long-time member of this organization, although I was unable to attend this meeting. All dates given in this paper are AD unless otherwise noted.
[2] Four additional papers and two posters were presented at the congress: Xavier Deru and Guillaume Florent, Roman pottery in the Plain of Flanders; Frederique Reigersman-van Lidth de Jeude, Emptied and repurposed or simply discarded? How to interpret ceramics from deep litter byres in Belgium and southern Netherlands; Roderick Geerts, Local pottery for Mediterranean dining. Pottery supply to the Early Roman legionary fort at Valkenburg, ZH; Joep Hendriks, Roman Nijmegen and its ceramic connections with the Batavian hinterland: the current state of affairs; Joost van den Berg and Dianne van de Zande, Beach archaeology: the search for the lost Roman classis-castellum of Vrouwenpolder-Oranjezon (Zeeland, the Netherlands); Julie van Kerckhove and Gerard Boreel, Mobility of people and pottery after Caesar’s Gallic wars. The program and abstracts are available online at https://www.fautores.org/pdf/2024%20RCRF%20Program.pdf .
[3] Nevertheless, a table listing 19 UNESCO World Heritage sites along the Lower Germanic Limes at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Germanic_Limes might still be useful to some users of this book. In addition to ancient and modern names, it describes the feature(s) and notes the occupation time period and when it was investigated, very handy for users of this volume who are not familiar with the Netherlands. The only errors I detected in the illustrations of the book were in matching the text, the captions, and the pictures in Reigersman-van Lidth de Jeude, figs. 3, 4.