Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

348 13. specialized production and exchange
(like stone). Fortunately, pottery not only survives well, but also offers the
economic historian enormous benefits. It can generally be dated and
assigned to a particular manufacturing centre, and its quality and finish
themselves tell us something of the level of sophistication that went into
its production.
The pottery trade, within the wider economy, was never of great importance,
but the considerable evidence we have for it can perhaps be used as
an indicator of broader economic trends. Since pots are everyday products
in universal use (whether cooking-pots, storage-jars or tableware), rather
than rare or luxury items, it is, I believe, reasonable to use the pottery trade
as an index of the wider role of specialization and exchange within the
economy. If pottery was being produced by sophisticated potting industries
and was being traded widely, reaching even distant and inland rural
areas, then it is highly likely that other comparable industries, that have left
few or no archaeological traces (making tools, clothing, farming equipment,
etc.), were equally sophisticated. Conversely, if all pottery was poorly
made and local in manufacture, then other products too are likely to have
been of a similar lack of sophistication. Furthermore, shipwreck evidence
shows that no pots, except amphorae, ever travelled alone in single shipments;
so it is also possible to use finds of imported pottery as a traceelement
of the shipment of goods that have themselves left no mark in the
soil.
A major problem with the archaeological evidence of pottery and other
products is that higher-quality goods and long-distance exchange have (not
unnaturally) attracted far more archaeological attention than less spectacular
regional industries, even though these were almost certainly of as great,
if not far greater, economic significance. It is, for example, now possible to
study in some detail the distribution within the Mediterranean of the fine
marble and high-quality tablewares which were fashionable in late antiquity,
but it is not yet possible to study the local and regional industries that produced
the bulk building-materials (stone, brick, tile, mortar, etc.) nor the
industries that produced the myriad different types of local cooking-wares. 4
One further area of archaeological evidence – the quantities of coin
found on different sites – sheds some light on the intensity of local exchange
but is difficult to use in detail. There is good evidence from the Roman
period of the widespread and frequent use of coins in everyday life, so their
presence or absence can be an index of commercial exchange. However,
coins were not primarily produced by the state in order to facilitate private
economic activity. Rather, they were minted in order to ease the process of
raising taxation and of paying imperial servants (in particular, the military).
So, in their production and diffusion (and hence in patterns of discovery in
4 Marble: Dodge and Ward-Perkins (1992). Tablewares: Hayes (1972); Hayes (1980); Atlante (1981).
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