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.
