Morgantina Studies, Volume VI

The Hellenistic and Roman Fine Pottery

Shelley C. Stone

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780691156729
• eBook ISBN: 9781400845163
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Excavation of the ancient city of Morgantina in southeastern Sicily since 1955 has recovered an extraordinary quantity and variety of pottery, both locally made and imported. This volume presents the fine-ware pottery dating between the second half of the fourth century BCE, when Morgantina was a thriving inland center closely tied to the Hellenistic east through Syracuse, and the first half of the first century CE, when Morgantina had been reduced to a dwindling Roman provincial town that would soon be abandoned. Bearing gloss and often paint or relief, these fine ceramics were mostly tableware, and together they provide a well-defined picture of the evolving material culture of an important urban site over several centuries. And since virtually all these vessels come from dated deposits, this volume provides wide-ranging contributions to the chronology of Hellenistic and early Roman pottery.


An introductory chapter sketches out a comprehensive history of the city, discusses the many well-dated archaeological deposits that contained the excavated pottery, and defines the major fabrics of the ceramics found at the site. The bulk of the volume consists of a scholarly presentation of more than 1,500 pottery vessels, analyzing their shapes, fabrics, chronology, decoration, and techniques of fabrication.


This rich ceramic material includes significant bodies of Republican black-gloss and red-gloss vases, Sicilian polychrome ware, and Eastern Sigillata A, as well as early Italian terra sigillata, with numerous examples imported from Arezzo and other Italian centers, along with regional versions from Campania and elsewhere on Sicily. The relief ware includes important groups of third-century BCE medallion cups and hemispherical moldmade cups of the second and first centuries BCE.


Morgantina was also an active center of pottery production, and the debris from several workshops has been recovered, enabling Shelley Stone to reconstruct the working techniques and materials of the local craftsmen, the range of ceramics they produced, and how their products were influenced by pottery imported to the site from elsewhere on Sicily, the Italian mainland, and even more distant centers. The volume also presents new information about the sources of the clay used by the Morgantina potters, as revealed by X-ray fluorescence analysis of selected vases.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Text Figures, Tables, and Charts
• List of Plates
• Editors’ Preface
• Preface
• Bibliography and Abbreviations
• I. History and Archaeology of Morgantina
• II. The Later 4th and 3rd Centuries BCE
• III. Republican Morgantina: Black- and Red-Gloss Wares after 211 BCE to ca. 35–25 BCE
• IV. Imported Early Italian Terra Sigillata and South Italian Regional Sigillatas
• V. Pottery with Moldmade Decoration
• VI. Thin-Walled Pottery
• VII. Catalogue
• Appendix 1: The evidence for Pottery Manufacture at Morgantina from the Later 4th Century BCE to the 1st Century CE
• Appendix 2: The Provenance of Ceramics at Morgantina from the 3rd Century BCE through the 1st Century CE as Defined by Portable EDXRF Analysis
• Appendix 3: Concordance of Shapes Found at Morgantina with Those Commonly Found in the Tombs of the 4th and the First Half of he 3rd Century BCE on Lipari
• Appendix 4: The Morgantina Silver Treasure
• Concordance of Inventory Numbers
• Subject Index
• Index of Deposits and Contexts
• Plates