Italian-type sigillata in Britain: a historiographical approach – Colin Wallace

Italian-type sigillata in Britain: what can we learn from a historiographical approach – a first account - Colin Wallace

Study Group for Roman Pottery 2025 Conference – Gloucester (UK) 6th-8th June 2025, @ The Folk of Gloucester & Museum of Gloucester

Sunday 8th June

It is more than 170 years since a man ploughing in a field in the parish of Foxton, Cambridgeshire put his foot into what turned out to be the mouth of a large amphora placed upright in the ground, which was found to be accompanied by a chalice in Italian-type sigillata, and other pottery. And so began the modern history of this class of Roman pottery (aka Arretine) in Britain. Here, I take a view of these early Roman red-slipped pottery vessels (chalices, other decorated bowls, plain plates & cups) found in Britain, very much informed by the historiography accumulating since 1852. Some of the writing is good knockabout stuff in the history of archaeology, eg F J Haverfield battling nonsense about it all coming from a Roman shipwreck on the British coast in AD 16, or Geoff Marsh painstakingly demonstrating the passing off of genuine pottery as having
falsely come from central London in the Nineteenth century. More seriously, all of it has had an effect on our present-day views, indicating not only that we continue to wrestle with both the issues (my use of the plural is deliberate) of just what purely Roman table-wares (as opposed to Gallo-Belgic, and Gallo-Belgic-influenced, ones) in pre-conquest Britain might mean and the siren call of what might, tongue-in-cheek, be called ‘post-conquestiness’, but also that an interpretation of Italian-type sigillata as part of the material culture of well-pre-AD 43 Romans in Britain seems more and more reasonable. Forget ‘survivals’, ‘trade’, even ‘prestige goods’, but so as not to replace an old single explanation with a new single one, don’t forget escaping gifts and special (or handy) fragments …