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Author Topic: Ancient Pottery - A New Challenge  (Read 620 times)

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Offline Joe Sermarini

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Ancient Pottery - A New Challenge
« on: December 22, 2022, 08:41:01 am »
Selling antiquities is extremely challenging. I have spent many thousands of dollars on books and spent hundreds of hours learning for EACH of a few types including: ancient glass, lamps, fibulae and arrowheads. And even with that, I do not consider myself an expert on any of them. More knowledgeable than most of humanity, yes; confident expert, not quite. I have spend almost as many hours on scarabs, shabtis, and clay tablets, but am hampered by having no possibility of actually reading hieroglyphics, or cuneiform. But the most difficult aspect of antiquities is that those types, just scratch the surface. And think about how different those things are from sculpture, bronzes, terracotta figures, pottery, wood, fabric...

Lately I have embarked on studying Pottery. Pottery is extremely complex because it was made locally EVERYWHERE and for millennium. So, the variety is extraordinary. And even the same shop or maker, often tried to make a great variety of types. I have blown my budget and filled another bookcase in the last month (and I already had a lot of books).

I have started expanding the ancient Pottery page on NumisWiki.  It is still a stub, more or less.

One nice aspect to pottery is that the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum is mostly online and it is HUGE. I have some of the volumes, but they can be very expensive and the online versions are perfectly useable. I have added a CVA Online page to NumisWiki, and am adding the types covered for the various volumes as I use them. It is helpful for me personally.

Please make updates or corrections to both pages (and the rest of NumisWiki) if you see something you can improve.

I actually have more than a dozen ancient plates, pots, jars, jugs, vases, etc. I bought them from Alex Malloy and a another collector's estate. They have no tags or labels, so I am starting from nothing. I have had them so many years because, for all but the most common types, I want references to a museum collection, excavation report, corpus, or pier reviewed article. I want to know the authenticity, culture, location, date, purpose, etc. with great confidence.

Here are some of my recent attributions - Ancient Pottery For Sale

Here is one that sold recently for which I am quite pleased with my research - Canaanite, Cypriot Imitative Lentoid Terracotta Pilgrim Flask

I would like to create a new board in this antiquities section for ancient pottery. Do we have any collectors that will volunteer to moderate?
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Offline Jay GT4

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Re: Ancient Pottery - A New Challenge
« Reply #1 on: December 22, 2022, 10:33:47 am »
 A Herculean task!  I have a few clay and pottery pieces but I'm far from an expert. I've only researched the pieces I have and even then it can be difficult.  If you need a moderator I'd be happy to.

Offline Joe Sermarini

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Re: Ancient Pottery - A New Challenge
« Reply #2 on: December 22, 2022, 11:07:47 am »
Thanks Jay. I will set it up soon.
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Offline Joe Sermarini

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Re: Ancient Pottery - A New Challenge
« Reply #3 on: December 22, 2022, 06:57:20 pm »
I have spent hours and hours and barely put a dent in the number of vessels I have to attribute, and it has given me a headache.
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Offline Dominic T

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Re: Ancient Pottery - A New Challenge
« Reply #4 on: December 22, 2022, 08:18:05 pm »
Very interesting research Joe. Sadly, I think the SHIPPING of these pottery will cause you headacheS TOO…
DT

Offline Joe Sermarini

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Re: Ancient Pottery - A New Challenge
« Reply #5 on: December 22, 2022, 08:22:31 pm »
I have been packing and shipping glass (and pottery) antiquities for more than 20 years. No problem.
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Offline Jay GT4

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Re: Ancient Pottery - A New Challenge
« Reply #6 on: December 22, 2022, 08:48:53 pm »
Joe do you know anyone who is able to translate cuneiform

Offline Dominic T

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Re: Ancient Pottery - A New Challenge
« Reply #7 on: December 22, 2022, 10:12:34 pm »
Jay, I believe John Nisbet (cicerokid) could help you with that.
DT

Offline Jay GT4

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Re: Ancient Pottery - A New Challenge
« Reply #8 on: December 22, 2022, 11:34:15 pm »
Oh really?  Thanks!  Thought he only did "New Style" tetradrachms

Offline SC

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Re: Ancient Pottery - A New Challenge
« Reply #9 on: December 25, 2022, 11:45:42 am »
I like ancient pottery but it can be a real pain.  At least if you want to identify anything beyond the basic pot form.

Most ancient pottery was coarse-ware which was cheap and relatively heavy.  It was thus made locally and rarely travelled, unless used to export goods - e.g. Baetican amphora from southern Spain that ended up all over the Mediterranean and wider Roman world as containers for olive oil.

This means that you can only really properly identify coarse-ware pieces if you know where they are from and find reports on those areas.  For example, I have lots of coarse-ware shards from the Carnuntum area in Austria and have been able to identify some through articles that appeared in old copies of Carnuntum Jahrbuch. 

But I also have some complete Roman jugs and pots with unknown find areas.  Even though they ae likely from the Danubian region that is still too wide for any book on pottery cover so I have never been able to find any real information.

By contrast fineware, such as terra sigillatta (aka Samian ware), travelled much more widely.  You'd think that with the many catalogues out there it would be easy to identify.  However, with literally hundreds or workshops, dozens of major ones, and heaps of designs each and things like stamps being passed through many workshops or copies from one to another it can be fiendishly hard to identify terra sigillatta. 

All this means that a resource such as Joe is starting would be very welcome.

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Offline Ron C2

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Re: Ancient Pottery - A New Challenge
« Reply #10 on: December 25, 2022, 01:34:44 pm »
Everything I know about Roman pottery, I got from a few books and some decent documentaries. As I understand things, echoing Shawn's points, local archeologists become experts in courseware for specific locations. Digs find datable coins in the same strata as coarse pottery, and certain characteristics get attributed to certain timeframes in that area - that they often use coins found with the pots to establish the baseline is what drew my interest.

But what is established in, for example, Roman Britain, would not translate to the Danube frontier unless if was finer flatware traded out from a major urban shop, such as Terra sigillata.
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Offline Kamnaskires

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Re: Ancient Pottery - A New Challenge
« Reply #11 on: December 25, 2022, 03:25:24 pm »
Nice to now have a new board dedicated to pottery posts. Thanks for setting it up, Joe. I will watch it with interest.

 

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