Ergasteria: premises and processes of creation in antiquity

Open Access

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]

In January of 2020, Elena Partida and Constanze Graml posted a call for papers “to explore the multiple facets of production and production sites in antiquity” (p. 1). COVID-19 soon intervened, and we can assume that no meeting took place, but the invitation ultimately bore fruit in the 22 papers of the volume under review. All are concerned with the transformation of raw or previously used materials into (new) objects, though the phases and aspects of the process examined differ, and the positions from which the authors approach the topic are varied as well. Over half of the papers concern sites in Greece, but the rest address workshops, products, and production processes in Asia Minor, the Pontus, Gaul, Italy, and North Africa, and the time span runs from the Protogeometric period to Late Antiquity.

The contributions are arranged in five parts. After an introduction by the editors that works to prepare the reader for the remarkable diversity of the offerings, the first section addresses the placement of workshops within the urban fabric (“A Spatial Approach to Workplaces”). Giorgos Sanidas ponders the case of nuisance crafts—foundries, potteries, tanneries—and whether or not there was a tendency to locate them outside the habitation area; surprisingly, the currently available evidence suggests not. Raphaël Clotuche and his colleagues describe the remarkable variety of workshops distributed throughout a small town in northern Gaul (Famars, ancient Fanum Martis) in the first three centuries CE: pottery, metalwork, tanning, bone and horn working, glue making, and plant and cereal processing. Clotuche and Damien Censier describe works of art documenting the worship of Apollo in the same town, notably fragments of a sculptural group made of local limestone (discussion of the quarrying and regional distribution of this stone justifies inclusion in the collection), a fine wall painting, and the remains of a monumental temple. On the shores of the Black Sea, Alla Bujskikh provides a glimpse of workshops that, from the 5^th century to the early Hellenistic period, sequentially produced metal objects and then pottery within a sanctuary at Olbia Pontica. Dora Katsonopoulou describes the well-preserved dyeworks that she excavated at Helike, on the southern shore of the Gulf of Corinth. Particularly rich is Gerhard Zimmer’s discussion of the bronze sculpture workshop under Amalias Avenue in Athens, excavated in preparation for construction of the Syntagma Station of the Athens Metro. To the spatial question, this article contributes the fact that the installation, which must have been a smokey, fiery place, was located outside the city walls, but also that it constitutes the only bronze workshop known to have had a permanent location in the city. Zimmer also offers much information on the technicalities of the craft, as well as thoughts on the relationship between practice and theory, seeing close ties between the work of the master sculptor and the aesthetic theories of the philosopher.

There are five papers in the second section, “Workshops Related to Quarries and Sculpture.” Ameur Younès explores the extraction and use of alabaster in Roman Tunisia, reporting on ten newly discovered quarries and photographically documenting the great variety of this beautiful stone from Tunisian sources. He also offers a survey of alabaster used at Roman sites in the country. Eirene Poupaki makes a similar sort of study of a stone that is less beautiful, but uniquely useful: the lava of the Greek island of Nisyros, where it was quarried and carved into millstones that were widely traded in the 4^th century and the Hellenistic period. A very different approach is that of Georgia Kokkorou-Alevras, who uses close observation of unfinished Archaic sculpture, much of it still lying where it was abandoned in the quarry, to follow the extraction and carving processes step by step, demonstrating that not only quarrymen, but also sculptors were active in all phases of this work and thus revising the standard picture of the quarry workforce. Georgios Doulfis also addresses the personnel of quarrying projects, starting from six rock-cut reliefs of Herakles of the Roman period, located at the Greek isthmus, in Laconia, and on Thasos. He notes that there, as elsewhere in the Empire, such carvings are associated with large extraction or excavation projects with strong connections to Roman authority, concluding that the reliefs were created by and in the interest of the soldiers, freedmen, and administrators who made up the workforce. Amalie Skovmøller returns to the workshop, doubling down on the growing certainty that ancient sculpture was routinely painted. Drawing insights from a recent experiment in the painting of a highly polished marble sculpture, she reimagines the Sculptor’s Workshop at Aphrodisias (active ca. 200–400 CE) as a workplace for both carving and painting, with the relevant materials, personnel, and use of space.

Four papers focusing on the ceramic arts follow (“In the Ateliers of Potters and Coroplasts”). In the absence of the workshops themselves, Gioulika Christakopoulou and Helene Simoni reconstruct production procedures from 267 Protogeometric pithoi excavated at Stamna, in Aitolia, where they served mostly as burial containers. Their complex typology (11 categories, 34 types) is difficult to follow, but more work is very welcome on a shape that is often ignored by archaeologists but was highly valued by its users. The workshops in Magna Graecia that produced the Archaic figurines studied by Eukene Bilbao Zubiri also remain undiscovered, but scrutiny of their products allows her to reconstruct the processes of their formation, combining mold use and hand modeling, and to trace relationships among artisans in different communities. The workshops themselves stand at the center of other studies. Marilena Kontopanagou describes the remains of potteries southwest of the Pnyx, in Athens, revealed at 37 sites excavated by the Greek Archaeological Service. From the middle of the 4^th century to the early 3^rd, potters there produced a wide range of domestic wares, but also kernoi and miniature pots with a presumed votive function. Attic pottery of this time is of course well known, but production sites have been elusive, and this view into an early Hellenistic Athenian kerameikos helps fill the gap. Raffaella Da Vela examines workshops and their products over a wider geographical area. She compares production on either side of the Apennines in northern Italy between the 9^th and the 5^th century BCE, drawing on both long-term and rescue excavations of pottery workshops. She replaces the old model of this region, as zones controlled by different ethnicities, with a vision of frontiers, contact zones, and socio-economic networks, and explores how and to what degree practitioners were able to share different levels of knowledge—for example, of local resources or technical operations.

The last two sections are largely devoted to the crafting and reuse of stone and the settings of these activities. Two of the four papers in “Construction Sites, Open-Air Workshops and Building Workforce” trace the influence of Athenian architecture outside the boundaries of Attica. Jacques des Courtils examines Athenian projects at Delos, Thasos, and Argos. The Delian case is unsurprising, given the periodic Athenian control of the island, but it took architectural detective work to reveal an Athenian hand at work in three buildings at Argos and in the Temple of Athena Poliouchos on Thasos, all built during limited periods of rapprochement between these states and Athens in the 5^th century. Similarly, in southwest Asia Minor, Laurence Cavalier detects the work of Athenian artisans in two 4^th-century funerary monuments: the Nereid Monument at Xanthos and Heroon of Perikles at Limyra. She suggests that whole crews of Athenian artisans took part, at Xanthos, perhaps from both an architectural and a sculptural workshop, having left Athens in search of employment at the completion of major projects on the Acropolis. Elena Partida considers the effects of what must have been non-stop construction in and around the sanctuaries at Delphi, where multiple crews of diverse origins mingled. Using a Morellian method to trace the workers, she highlights the impact of their anonymous labor on the architecture of the site and recreates the constant ferment of construction and creativity at small and large scale at a sanctuary that we are used to envisioning in a perfectly completed state that never existed. The final paper in this section, by Konstantinos Sarantidis, turns to the small Milesian fortification built in the 4^th century BCE at Kastraki on the Dodecanesian island of Agathonisi, using it to demonstrate a method for estimating the time and labor required for its construction. With the 19^th-century building manual of Giovanni Pegoretti as a guide, and on the basis of known or closely estimated variables (dimensions of walls, type of stone, distance from quarry, style of masonry, etc.), he estimates that a workforce of 100–150 workers, divided into four to six teams, could have completed the fort in from four to six years. As Sarantides stresses, such a computation can never give us the actual time and labor expended. It is nonetheless valuable in providing a sense of the scale of the project.

The first two papers of the final section turn to the reuse of sculpture and architectural elements (“Repair, Reuse and Spolia: Concepts of Chaîne Opératoire”). While recent discussions have stressed the aesthetics and the possible intended messages of such reuse, these papers investigate practicalities. Constanze Graml examines the case of grave monuments. Pointing out that memory of the dead and care of their monuments rarely last more than three or four generations, she discounts any notion that reuse constitutes desecration. Rather, she examines known scenarios, from the appropriation of stelai by means of altered inscriptions or recarving, to recycling as votives, export as works of art, and incorporation into later architecture. Turning to the reuse of architectural elements, Anna Sitz examines the documentable steps of the procedure. She identifies partially recut blocks abandoned in storage while awaiting reuse at Labraunda. At Claros she traces the deliberate dismantling of the temple and follows the trail of its blocks, some abandoned en route to the harbor of Notion. Finally, Sitz demonstrates how incorporation of elements of the clifftop temple above the Cilician Corycian cave had a dramatic impact on the design of the basilica into which they were built.

The final paper in this section, by Susanne Bosche, has nothing to do with spolia or architecture. It may seem to have been tucked in here as a convenience, but in fact it offers a fitting conclusion to the collection: an analysis of the chaîne opératoire model, a key concept for the investigation of production and hence relevant to every study here. Bosche uses the Elgin lyre in the British Museum to illustrate her comments, pointing out flaws in earlier discussions and reconstructions of the instrument. Her real subject, however, is the chaîne opératoire model itself. Her essay reveals the almost infinite complexity of the steps that lay behind the lyre’s construction. Indeed, the correct application of the model to anything but the simplest of artifacts emerges as a formidable challenge, as links are revealed to be interchained and interconnected in a seemingly endless tangle of relationships. The theoretical aspects of Bosche’s contribution are outside my field of expertise, but her paper serves as a caution against the unexamined use of the term.

Ergasteria is a well-produced book. The many illustrations are mostly in color and are reproduced at a generous scale. The articles are all in English, not the first language of most of the authors, but the editing is excellent, and the text is generally clear and free of major awkwardness. The lengthy common bibliography constitutes a rich source of documentation, and indices help to draw connections between the papers. A list of the contributors with their contact details and affiliations would have been welcome; given the collection’s wide range, few readers will be familiar with all of them and their work. That range ensures, however, that almost anyone with an interest in ancient production will find something of interest here.

Authors and titles

1. ΕΡΓΑΣΤΗΡΙΑ: Premises and Processes of Creation in Antiquity. An Introduction (Elena C. Partida and Constanze Graml)

Α Spatial Approach to Workplaces: Urban, Religious, Littoral Context

2. Tales from the workshop and normative beauty (Gerhard Zimmer)
3. Craft production and nuisance in the ancient Greek city: Spatial and functional approaches to urban industrial activities (Giorgos M. Sanidas)
4. Dyeworks network around the Gulf of Corinth: A specialised seaside textile workshop in Late Classical-Hellenistic Helike (Dora Katsonopoulou)
5. Workplaces in the southern sacred area at Olbia Pontica (Alla V. Bujskikh)
6. Handicraft activities in the small town of Fanum Martis: (Famars, northern France): Analysing and interpreting spatial organisation and production size (Raphaël Clotuche, Sonja Willems, Jean-Hervé Yvinec, Marie Derreumeaux, Jennifer Clerget, Nicolas Tisserand, Bérangère Fort, Gaëtan Jouanin)
7. Evocations of Apollo in northern Gaul and craftsmen engaged in his representation: The example of Fanum Martis (Raphaël Clotuche and Damien Censier)

Workshops Related to Quarries and Sculpture

8. Ancient Greek quarries: Installations and workshops—extraction and sculpture techniques (Georgia Kokkorou-Alevras)
9. New evidence about the exploitation of Nisyrian millstone lava and its use in Nisyrian workshops in antiquity (Eirene A. Poupaki)
10. Heracles rock reliefs at quarries and construction sites in Roman Greece: An interpretative approach (Georgios Doulfis)
11. Roman calcite alabasters in Tunisia (Ameur Younès)
12. All about marble carving? In search of craftspeople of polychromy in the ancient Roman sculpture workshop (Amalie Skovmøller)

In the Ateliers of Potters and Coroplasts

13. The ‘Cracking the Code’ project: Stamna’s pithoi workshops —unveiling pottery heritage (Gioulka Christakopoulou and Helene Simoni)
14. The coroplast’s workshop and its production: Reflecting on the craft practices of the Archaic πλάστης in Magna Graecia (Eukene Bilbao Zubiri)
15. Localisation, distribution and nature of pottery production of the fourth-century BC ceramic workshops in Ano Petralona, Athens: A synthesis of the available archaeological evidence (Marilena Kontopanagou)
16. Local knowledgescapes in pottery production: A new heuristic approach to the Iron Age pottery workshops between the Arno Valley and the Po Plain (Raffaella Da Vela)

Construction Sites, Open-Air Workshops and Building Workforce

17. Athenian architecture abroad in the fifth century: Fashion or imperialism? (Jacques des Courtils)
18. More on Athenian architecture abroad: Xanthos as a case study (Laurence Cavalier)
19. Contextualizing the scaffold: Workspace within cult space and the dynamics of construction sites at Delphi (Elena C. Partida)
20. Building procedures of the fortification at Kastraki on Milesian Agathonisi: Quarrying and construction sites as open-air provisional ergasteria (Konstantinos Sarantidis)

Repair, Re-Use and Spolia: Concepts of Chaîne Operatoire

21. Less piety, more pragmatics: Some diachronic observations on the re-use of Greek funerary monuments (Constanze Graml)
22. The practicalities of spoliation: Tool marks, craftspeople, and building logic (Anna M. Sitz)
23. Learning by …? And learning what? Possibilities and limitations of chaîne(s) opératoire(s)-approaches using the example of the Elgin Lyre (Susanne Bosche)