The rise and fall of the Roman pottery industry

[phantom power]

Ummm. Uh oh.

The Roman pottery industry was huge, capable, and highly centralized, churning out fine tableware, storage vessels, roof tiles, and many other goods in such vast quantities that archeologists across Roman Europe struggle to cope with the fragments today. The pottery works at La Graufesenque in what is now southern France and was then the province of Gallia Narbonense, for instance, shipped exquisite products throughout the western empire, and beyond it – goods bearing the La Graufesenque stamp have been found in Denmark and eastern Germany. Good pottery was so cheap and widely available that even rural farm families could afford elegant tableware, sturdy cooking pots, and watertight roof tiles.

Rome’s fall changed all this. When archeologists uncovered the grave of a sixth-century Saxon king at Sutton Hoo in eastern Britain, for example, the pottery found among the grave goods told an astonishing tale of technical collapse. Had it been made in fourth century Britain, the Sutton Hoo pottery would have been unusually crude for a peasant farmhouse; two centuries later, it sat on the table of a king. What’s more, much of it had to be imported, because so simple a tool as a potter’s wheel dropped entirely out of use in post-Roman Britain, as part of a cascading collapse that took Britain down to levels of economic and social complexity not seen there since the subsistence crises of the middle Bronze Age more than a thousand years before.

(...)

What happened to put such obviously useful items out of the reach of the survivors of Rome’s collapse? As Ward-Perkins shows, the post-Roman economic collapse had its roots in the very sophistication and specialization that made the Roman economy so efficient. Pottery, again, makes an excellent example of the wider process. Huge pottery factories like the one at La Graufesenque, which used specialist labor to turn out quality goods in immense volume, could make a profit only by marketing their wares on a nearly continental scale, using sophisticated networks of transport and exchange to reach consumers all over the western empire who wanted pottery and had denarii to spend on it. The Roman world was rich, complex, and stable enough to support such networks – but the post-Roman world was not.

The implosion of the western empire thus turned what had been a massive economic advantage into a fatal vulnerability. As the networks of transport and exchange came apart, the Roman economy went down with it, and that economy had relied on centralized production and specialized labor for so long that there was nothing in place to take up the slack. During the Roman Empire’s heyday, people in the towns and villas near Sutton Hoo could buy their pottery from local merchants, who shipped them in from southern Britain, Gaul, and points further off. They didn’t need local pottery factories, and so didn’t have them, and that meant their descendants very nearly ended up with no pottery at all.

http://www.energybulletin.net/42822.html

[Cassandra]

1. I have a lot of craft skills...

although I'm not often doing something practical with them. I did fix my (mechanical) front door bell the other day. Nice to have plenty of wire and pliers around the house.
I also have more odd tools than most people; 2 bead looms, a flexshaft drill and drill press, carving tools, etc.

[Growler]

2. Very cool read

K&R!

[formercia]

3. Library Books sales

There's nothing like hard copy.

In the last several years, Libraries have been selling off inventory make room for more popular titles.

I've been collecting old craft books going back over a century from these sales and elsewhere.

How many people today are interested in Steam Engines? With the books I have, there is the information on how to build one from the ground up with simple technology. What I saved from recycling may help someone in the future. Many, many subjects on basic technology that was the cutting edge in the 19th Century, but now relegated to the trash heap.



Some day, there may not be an Internet. How will people look up information then?

[Hugin]

8. Be sure to pick up the "Foxfire" book series...

I have the first 5 or 6...

"The series is an effort to document the lifestyle, culture, and skills of people in southern Appalachia in a mixture of how-to information and first-person narratives and oral history. Topics covered in the books include apple butter, banjos, basket weaving, beekeeping, butter churning, corn shucking, dulcimers, faith healing, fiddle making, haints, ginseng cultivation, hide tanning, hog dressing, hunting tales, log cabin building, moonshining, midwives, old-time burial customs, planting "by the signs", preserving foods, sassafras tea, snake handling and lore, soap making, spinning, square dancing, wagon making, weaving, wild food gathering, witches, and wood carving.

Eight of the first nine of the books were edited by Eliot Wigginton, a high school teacher at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, who set up the Foxfire Fund, based on articles his students had written that were previously published in magazine form. The magazine was named after foxfire, the bioluminescent fungi sometimes seen in a forest. The magazine was founded in 1966 by Wigginton, who was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1989.

Though conceived primarily as a sociological work, the books, particularly the early ones, were a commercial success as instructional works. Members of the back-to-the-land movement used them as a blueprint for their attempts to return to a life of simplicity. The publication is an imprint of Random House and has become a project of Rabun County, Georgia High School."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxfire_books

[formercia]

14. I watch for them

Yankee Magazine also did a series on a similar topic for some traditional New England skills. It's not as extensive and each soft cover covers a series of topics in a more formal arrangement.

[knitter4democracy]

25. Their spinning section's not that great.

Not enough detail, and I forget which details are wrong, but a spinner obviously didn't write it. I hope it's not that way in the rest of it because I read all the ones my high school library had.

[nashville_brook]

4. that is such a cool way to tell the story of empire.

another great reason to teach art/humanities in school -- pottery might not be your bag but there's stories told by pottery (or textiles or technology) that aren't part of our education otherwise.

this story gives us a sense of what post-hegemony America could be like. it kinda forces us to ask how we're going to deal with something like that, instead of just being observers.

also it makes me want a giant gas-powered kiln all the more! just what i need, another craft!

[bbgrunt]

5. very interesting. any chance of cross posting it in GD?

[phantom power]

6. I figure it has plenty of exposure, having 12 recommendations.

However, anybody is free to cross-post it if they see fit.

[fedsron2us]

7. The grave goods from Sutton Hoo

were a good deal more sophisticated and cosmopolitan than this article would lead you to believe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton_Hoo

One of the reasons so little pottery was found in the grave is because most of the tableware was made of sliver or bronze.

http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/families_and_children/online_tours/sutton_hoo/bowls_and_spoons.aspx

In addition Samian ware from Roman Gaul had largely been replaced by locally manufactured British pottery long before the Western Roman Empire collapsed and the Anglo-Saxons arrived.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A3342610

[GliderGuider]

9. This is a brilliant cautionary tale.

One can find the intellectual support for it in any number of places -- Resilience theory, Tainter's "Collapse of complex societies" etc., but there's nothing like a concrete (or at least earthenware) example to drive the point home.

We've screwed ourselves but good. What clever monkeys we are!

[phantom power]

10. We're like the Roman Empire, turned up to 11. Or maybe 1100.

double plus good

[tom_paine]

27. Or 11,000,000.

As they said in Spinal Tap, "You see, it goes up to eleven. And that's higher than ten, isn't it?"

[tom_paine]

11. Yes. Not just a cautionary tale, but one with such specific referrents as to be 100% applicable

today...in spite of the massive evolution of technology in 2000 years.

That in itself is kind of astonishing, that there is ANY situation from 2000 years ago that could be said to be 90%+ analogous to a current situation. Some similarity is one thing, full similarity quite another.

That in and of itself speaks to the basic, cyclical and relatively unchanging nature of the primate known as human.

In fact, it's quite stunning that it is an almost certainty that Peak Oil should leave us with 100% the exact same problem in a few years with many many products! 100%!

We are clever monkeys but we are also cyclical monkeys. We also learn little to nothing form history since we keep repeating it over and over and over...

Yes, this is a fantastic find of an article and as you said, a brilliant and concrete cautionary tale.

Unfortunately, who of our Leaders has the time to take out from object acquisition and throwing feces at the other monkeys to give a damn?

You want monkey cleverness? You have it right there in the monkey feces we once threw at each other, which are now burning flaming jellied napalmed exploding phosphorescent feces to throw at the monkeys we don't like. Even nuclear feces which can devastate a city all at once, if we are mad enough and want to throw this "Cadillac of poop" at our enemies.

I mean is that not the definition of progress? We have increased the deadliness of our monkey-poop a million fold, a billion fold, and can now throw our monkey-poop not across the field but across the world.

Yes, we are some clever tool-using monkeys. They can carve that in 100-foot high letters on the Redwall of Grand Canyon (to borrow the concept from Kurt Vonnegut) as our species' epitaph for the alien anthoplogists to find when they come to pick over the ruins.

It still may be that enough human can survive what's coming to continue the species, and thus we won't need an epitaph for the future is as yet unwritten.

But maybe we should carve that epitaph into the Redwall...just in case.

[GliderGuider]

12. High five, brother

Very, very well said.:thumbsup:

[losthills]

13. Great post.

Relevant and illuminating...

[knitter4democracy]

15. We're not quite in the same boat.

In the Middle Ages, knitting was almost entirely a guild thing--you had to join the guild and go through the process of learning how to be a master knitter. These days, people can learn for free on-line or at any number of free knitting meetups. Same for any other craft.

Should everything fall apart, which is possible, I suppose, we have many crafters who would be able to take care of our basic needs. Those of us who knit and spin, do basketry and pottery, weave and sew would keep on doing so, and we'd manage somehow. I found a great machine shop a couple weeks back, and they helped fix the axle on one of my spinning wheels, so we have good metal people still around.

[phantom power]

17. Could be. How "different" our infosphere makes us is a subject of debate.

I think the existence of things like cheap books, the internet, etc, may represent some kind of tool for mitigating our problems. Information is power, and we do have access to more information, cheaply.

On the other hand, imagine if most people lose access to the internet, and cheap books. Because that's what happens as energy becomes unaffordable. Also, there are supply-chain issues. You know how to knit, but can you get yarn? And will you have time, if you have to spend your time on subsistence.

There's an old saying:
"The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time."

I find questions like this fascinating. Important, but hard to answer.

[GliderGuider]

21. Having spent 20 years working in telecom R&D

I have a reasonable idea of the complexity of the internet. Yes, DARPA designed it to survive a nuclear war, but since the risk of that went away the system has become immensely fragile as it was made more "efficient" to meet commercial needs.

Power outages and extended maintenance shortfalls are going to cause a very gradual degradation of performance until some critical point is hit, then we'll likely see clusters of router nodes going down in cascades. I bet we'll see a fragmentation of the net, with disjoint islands of stability forming. Those islands will probably be geographical, so adjacent regions or countries will end up with separate networks that have lost the ability to communicate. We shouldn't count on major enterprises like Google remaining universally accessible even if they stay up.

The Internet will become a microcosmic metaphor for our whole civilization.

[phantom power]

22. So true. The intertubes "can" use highly redundant pathways. But they don't.

[knitter4democracy]

24. I could see that.

My stepdad says similar stuff, being a web guy and programmer for the scientific research station where he works. He says that it's time to fix it now but that no one wants to spend the money.

[knitter4democracy]

23. There are libraries, and I know many poor knitters.

They go to thrift shops, buy nice sweaters, and unravel them to get yarn for only a couple of bucks. They get yarn at garage sales and estate sales, and often decent needles, too. If they get on-line, they can participate in swaps or might get a box of a knitting friend's stash yarn as a gift. The knitting friends I have knit to stay sane. They knit on the bus, while waiting for anyone/anything, and at night to relax enough to go to sleep. For those of us who are serious knitters, we can't not knit--it's in our bones, and we don't do well without yarn and needles in our hands at least once a day.

There are many of us knitters and spinners who have seriously big stashes in our homes. It would take awhile to knit it all up. As for yarn, that's easy--spin more. I know spinners who grow their own flax and process it, and I have several good sheep farms not far away. Sheep are hardy creatures (well, some breeds are hardier than others) and can survive without special feed. Then you have milk, wool, leather, and meat all in one package. Granted, they'd have to charge more, but prices have gone up a lot in the 20 years I've been spinning, and people are still paying them and buying fleeces, wheels, drum carders, and more.

As for cheap books, that's why I try to let the libraries I use know which books they should have and keep on their shelves. As a kid, I read through the Foxfire series in my high school library and loved it (though their spinning section needed work). As long as the libraries wouldn't get looted and would stay open, we'd have the info we'd need.

[phantom power]

26. When I say "poor" or "subsistence" I'm thinking in terms like this:

[knitter4democracy]

31. I know. Notice, however, he's still clothed.

Someone had to make that. Someone had to wash it. The boy is sitting on a blanket. Again, someone had to make that. Notice the pot the boy is touching--that's obviously handmade.

Spinning is at least 10,000 years old, and there's good evidence to suggest that the first spun fibers were plant fibers that had rotted over the winter, possibly hemp (flax wasn't in that region yet). People need thread and yarn for many purposes, and many fibers can be spun. Spinners will find a way, weavers will find a way, knitters will find a way. We always have. Horst Schultz, an amazing knitting designer, learned to knit in the concentration camps with threads unravelled from rags and with wire left over from making the fences. Fiber artists are like that--we have to do it or go crazy, and people need what we make.

[izquierdista]

29. Different boat, same ocean

What swamped the Romans has happened here too. Reread the article and instead of pottery, insert "American machine tool industry", "American agriculture", "American semiconductor industry", etc., and you will see that it is the same thing happening all over.

[knitter4democracy]

32. As a Michigander, I totally get that.

My brother started up a company that makes and sells child-sized dirt bikes, and he's having a hard time keeping it going, so yeah, I understand what you're saying.

Still, when people say that we'll be totally lost, that people won't know how to survive, that knowledge will be lost, I have to disagree. In Michigan, there still are machine shops with knowledgeable machinists doing good work (I found one to fix my spinning wheel's bent axle). There still are people who know how to do these things, so we'll survive. Things will be bad, and they are going to get worse, and many are really suffering, but we'll survive.

[izquierdista]

34. I'm glad you found a machinist

But what are the machinist's sons doing?

[knitter4democracy]

35. There were two young kids working there when I was there.

One was still learning from one of the older guys, sure, but they were obviously working in the middle of the day and doing good work.

[Summer93]

16. My addition

I have the manual, still working, Singer Sewing Machine that my Great-Grandmother used in her job as a seamstress for her entire adult life. Manual means that it uses pulleys and a treadle but no electricity.

[4_TN_TITANS]

18. Interesting read.... History - meet the USA. n/t

[GliderGuider]

19. History, meet the whole f'ing world

You can't build a global civilization this vulnerable unless everybody participates...

[phantom power]

20. it's synergy:

[XemaSab]

28. Good read...

There will be enough material goods around to last for decades, probably... After the fall of the Roman empire, people didn't go out and smash their tableware overnight.

The pisser for us is going to be basic supply-chain issues. Okay, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to make a clay vase on a wheel, but where do we get the clay FROM? Knitting a sweater is a task that has been mastered by a brazillan little old ladies, but getting wool from the sheep to the yarn ball is a skill known only to a few. Felling trees and building a house with hand tools is virtually a lost skill.

Making a t-shirt or a sheet for the bed... these things are automated. Milling lumber is automated.

And all that's with simple material goods, which are not NEEDED.

Digging a well? Raising food in your yard to provide a balanced diet (flavor notwithstanding)? Safe sewage and garbage disposal?

All skills that have a STEEP and SWIFT learning curve.

[Summer93]

30. Community

Somewhere there lies a line where community with others works well and then there is corporatism where it does not work well. It seems to me that small communities where people contribute the expertise they have and reap that of others in the community has worked.

Now our society begins with the idea that the only thing that needs to be contributed is money and then all will be provided by that larger entity the corporation. The price is decided by the corporation. Out of sight out of mind. Our society does not have to even think about sewage or garbage disposal - just pay the fee and go play. Of course, it becomes trickier when food is the item being provided. Not everyone can pay the price to eat.

We lost compassion when we moved from the small community to the corporation. The smaller community would take someone in and feed them and then would expect them to contribute in some way. The corporation cannot feed the hungry as it would impact their bottom line. Their investors would not approve.

[knitter4democracy]

33. There are more knitters and spinners than you think.

Ravelry, a knitting/spinning/crochet Facebook-like website, has over 100,000 members. I belong to a spinning guild with almost 700 members, and we meet every month in a town outside of Detroit with people driving from all over. Same with all the crafts--there's been a resurgance in the last decade, and more and more people are making their own sheets and t-shirts, their own wood pieces, their own yarn and sweaters and socks.

We have three companies in town that dig wells, many people here garden heavily with all sorts of greenhouses everywhere selling all sorts of good stuff to grow and eat with master gardeners teaching classes in several locations, and we have many sewage and garbage companies. All of that won't disappear overnight, and they're training new people all the time.