0000000000975821
AUTHOR
Barca D.
Building ceramics: Brick, tile, and clay
Tiles for use in construction were made in quantity at Vagnari, as Alastair Small’s investigations made clear. He uncovered one tile kiln in the vicus area north of the ravine and five south of the ravine that were producing tiles from the 1st to the 4th century AD, although not all at the same time (Small 2011b: 231–64). There may well have been more, as yet undiscovered, kilns in and around the settlement, together with the requisite tile-making provisions, such as drying sheds or yards and large ponds or basins for mixing clay and water. Archaeologically explored and well-preserved tile-making facilities of local and regional importance in northeast Spain give us an idea of the complex p…
The Dolia Defossa and viticulture at Vagnari
At Vagnari, the fabric of the dolia defossa was distinctively different from that present in all the other ceramics from the site, as it was a distinctive orangey-red with black, glassy particles and reddish-brown grit fragments. The surviving lid fragment, on the other hand, is made of a fairly fine buff clay, suggesting it was made somewhere else. It is not unusual that dolia and lids might be made of different clays and in different workshops, as they are in Gallia Narbonensis, where some analysed lids were made in Rome, but the vessels were local. The recognition that it is important to conduct fabric analyses on dolia retrieved in archaeological excavations, whether on land or in the s…