Under the supervision of Dr. Kathleen Lynch, Jed Thorn will conduct a chemical analysis of South Italian red-figure pottery as part of his doctoral dissertation project. The red-figure technique was transmitted to southern Italy by Athenian craftsmen during the mid-5th century BC. In addition to having been an important export market for Attic red-figure, South Italy had also received colonial settlements of Greek immigrants from c. 700 BC onward. Consequently, it has been widely assumed that the main branch of South Italian red-figure - termed "Apulian" after its primary area of distribution - was produced by one of these Greek colonies.
As the only Greek colony in Apulia, Taras (modern Taranto) is commonly regarded as the birthplace and primary production center of Apulian red-figure pottery. However, there is still no firm archaeological or archaeometric evidence for where this pottery was produced. The distribution data suggest that the primary consumers of this pottery were not, in fact, colonial Greeks, but rather the region's pre-colonial Italic population. In subjecting a large group of Apulian red-figure samples to chemical analysis, this project will constitute an important and unprecedented step toward determining whether this pottery was produced at a Greek or a non-Greek site.
The project's primary objective is to determine the degree of chemical variability in the clays utilized by Apulian red-figure workshops. A program of neutron activation analysis will be used to isolate the chemical compositions of Apulian red-figure vases drawn from seven different museum collections. It will also analyze ceramic reference material from the site of ancient Taras, which will reveal whether Apulian red-figure vases assumed to have been produced at Taras conform chemically to ceramic objects that are known to have been produced at Taras.
Contrary to consensus opinion, it is possible that Apulian red-figure pottery was produced itinerantly at a number of non-Greek sites. The neutron activation analysis could confirm the use of multiple regional clay types, which would lend significant weight to this hypothesis. The possibility of itinerant production has significant implications not only for our understanding of Apulian red-figure pottery, but also for our understanding of intercultural dynamics between Greeks and non-Greeks in ancient South Italy. As a European colonial environment that predated concrete conceptions of "Europe" or "the West," ancient Apulia emerges as an extremely useful point of comparison for studies of more recent colonial interactions that were constrained by more modern social, religious, and economic attitudes.
The project represents a multidisciplinary approach to an important archaeological question. The sample-collection process has entailed the cooperation of museum conservation laboratories, and the project will successfully bridge the disciplines of classical archaeology, museum studies, and archaeometry. It will employ the services of the Archaeometry Laboratory at the University of Missouri, which is designed to be an educational facility. A multi-tiered staff ranging from undergraduate interns to PhDs will prepare and process the sample group. Finally, the results of the neutron activation analysis will contribute to a growing dataset that will permit further research questions to be asked and answered by future investigators.
