The emergence of Rome’s far-flung territorial empire resulted in a sophisticated regime for the storage and distribution of foodstuffs. This dissertation focuses on a ceramic container used for the storage of wine and oil, the dolium, to investigate how Rome’s long-distance, large-scale food supply system impacted craftsmen and agricultural workers in west-central Italy during the period of c. 200 BCE-200 CE. It studies the processes, materials, and skills invested in over three hundred dolia and dolium fragments from Cosa, Pompeii, and Ostia to bring to light the workforces that produced, repaired, used, and maintained these costly investments that were important not only for agriculture, but also food storage in urban settlements. With a lucrative wine market developing overseas, viticultural areas expanded and the demand for wine and large-scale wine fermentation and storage containers exploded. Dolium producers used the same technique (coil-building), but the scale of production differed between the settlements. Potters designed and expanded the dolium, but it was risky and expensive to produce these vessels; dolium production became increasingly subsumed under large opus doliare workshops, owned by wealthy aristocrats, senators, and members of the imperial family. By the second century CE, artisans of urban opus doliare workshops that produced dolia, bricks, and tile had developed their methods and vessel design in close alignment; the success of these major workshops was so great that the Tiber River Valley had been transformed into antiquity’s Ceramic Valley, a hub of ceramic and terracotta production. Building such large vessels, however, was a task fraught with risk, and craftspeople had to develop new methods in their routines, some of which were derived from traditional pottery mending techniques while others were entirely new creations inspired by the architectural industries. The types of damage for dolia, and the methods and materials for their repairs, not only shed light on developments in dolium repair technology, but also on the different workforces. Craftspeople aligned and experimented with their methods, interacting also with the architectural industry to develop new techniques to build these vessels. As the storage regime for Rome became more sophisticated, the utility and importance of dolia extended from production sites to urban settlements, supporting and perhaps even driving raising levels of urbanism. Over time, the very practices and technologies of storage themselves cast a wider net that drew in many potters, architectural workers, farmers, porters, and unskilled workers to propel an ancient global food supply.

This dissertation examines the evidence for burial in archaic Rome and Latium with a view to understanding the nature of urban development in the region. In particular, I focus on identifying those social and political institutions that governed relations between city-states at a time when Rome was becoming the most influential urban center in the area. I examine the evidence for burial gathered primarily from the past four decades or so of archaeological excavation in order to present first, a systematic account of the data and second, an analysis of these materials. I reveal that a high degree of variation was observed in funerary ritual across sites, and suggest that this points to a complex system of regional networks that allowed for the widespread travel of people and ideas. I view this as evidence for the openness of archaic societies in Latium, whereby people and groups seem to have moved across regions with what seems to have been a fair degree of mobility. I connect the variety in tomb construction to the more widespread phenomenon of monumentalization, which encouraged the construction in stone of residences, temples and public buildings across the region. I consider the individuals and groups responsible for these types of construction, and how they contributed to the development of and interaction between city-states.

I begin with an assessment of the historical reliability of the ancient sources concerning early Rome, since they were written centuries later than the time in question, yet comment on some of the features in the archaeological record. I go on to consider the literary evidence for funerary ritual in early Rome, in order to determine what the ancient sources have to say about the customs of their ancestors and what significance this has for the archaeological evidence. Then, I consider the documentary evidence for funerary ritual, which comes from the legislation of the Twelve Tables. The prohibitions preserved here, if they represent a valid document, illustrate the concerns of lawmakers with regard to funerary activity in and around the city of Rome. In the following section I present the archaeological evidence for burial, and provide a detailed summary of archaic burials according to site, and offer a brief description of each settlement in order to better contextualize the data. I conclude this section with an interpretation of the evidence. Finally, I concentrate on the archaeological evidence from archaic Gabii, which results from my own participation on the excavation of the site. The results of these excavations allow for the study of the intersection between the urban area, burial and landownership.

This dissertation explores how the inhabitants of first-century CE Pompeii prepared their daily meals and what factors influenced their choice of cooking techniques. In order to reconstruct ancient culinary practices, I rely on two understudied yet exceptionally revealing categories of material evidence: the vessels and utensils making up the town’s domestic kitchenware assemblages and representations of food and drink preparation in the visual arts of Pompeii and the Roman world more broadly. While the latter allow us to visualize ancient kitchen choreography and the ephemeral bodily practices of the cook at work, the former reveal in unique detail patterns of actual employment through use alterations (i.e. physical or chemical changes to the body of an object resulting from use) embedded in their surfaces. Through the systematic analysis of use alterations exhibited by food preparation implements made of bronze, ceramic, iron, and stone recovered from nineteen properties in Pompeii, I retrace the life histories of individual implements and reconstruct how particular forms tended to be used. I also examine the frequencies of the various types of implements found within each property in order to assess, to the extent possible, what constituted the standard kitchen kit, or batterie de cuisine, within the Pompeian home and how this could be modified according to the needs, priorities, and personal tastes of the cook and household.