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1. This house and its finds are published in Boozer et al. 2015.
2. Ast and Davoli 2016.
3. CERAMIC FABRICS AND SHAPES
Clementina Caputo
The purpose of this section is to complement the papyrological study resulting from the textual and paleographical analysis of the ostraka of Amheida with information concerning the pottery supports on which they were written.1
The reuse of ceramic materials for purposes different from their original ones is very common, not only at Amheida but everywhere in Egypt and in the ancient world at large.2 One of the main reuses of ceramic sherds in antiquity was in fact as the support material for the production of ostraka.3 At Amheida, pottery sherds were also abundantly used inside walls and especially in vaults covering the rooms of the town’s buildings, prolonging the “life” of ceramic fragments, which became in fact building material.4 Additionally, excavations at the site have attested to the reuse of pottery sherds that were already disposed of in larger dump contexts as fillings for the foundation layers of new buildings. In this case, the refuse already accumulated in a dump was laid as a fill for foundation trenches and building yards, and subsequently sealed off by the floors of the rooms of later buildings. In Area 2 at Amheida, ostraka are noticeably abundant in this kind of deposition.
In the past, it has been rare for ostraka, widespread as they were, and not only in Greco-Roman Egypt,5 to receive much attention for any aspect other than their explicit written contents, and interest in the support, i.e., the type of sherd chosen to write on, has been particularly rare.6 Apart from a few exceptions, it was only in the 1990s that a certain interest in ostraka, both as texts and as artifacts associated with an archaeological context, started to develop.7
Indeed, when this important category of finds is associated with specific geographic, temporal, and spatial contexts it can inform us about a wide range of activities taking place during all periods of occupation of an ancient site. Their contents add to the archaeological data new evidence for the social and economic interpretation of the settlement and the dwellings or public contexts in which they are found.
In general, ostraka are often dated with far more accuracy than other archaeological evidence, thereby contributing to the dating of archaeological layers and their specific contexts.8 When dates can be ascribed to ostraka, they can also provide reference points for the general study of the ceramics, informing us of the timeframe during which particular shapes were in use. In turn, this information can provide dating to contexts in which ostraka without any internal chronological indications occur. Furthermore, knowledge of the different fabrics of ostraka and of the location of pottery workshops not only enables scholars to determine the place of manufacture of the potsherds but also the origins of certain texts and the commodities there mentioned.9
This innovative approach to the study of the ceramic support, used on the ostraka from Amheida, allows us to utilize the morphology of potsherds to create a ceramological classification of the ostraka that can then be compared with the groupings resulting from the paleographical study of the texts. The investigation of the array of types these fragments belong to is fundamental in addressing issues of chronology and technical production, as well as the identification of complete vessels from which they derive. Finally, through the combination of vessel types, dating, and texts one can speculate on whether complete vessels of a particular type were still in use at the time when the text was written, or if fragments from the broken vessels were reused after a relatively long period of time, possibly even coming from a dump layer.10 In general, it must be stressed that the date of the creation of the support provides only a terminus post quem for the writing of the ostrakon, and that in principle centuries could pass between the two acts.
3.1. METHODOLOGY
The direct observation and study of the supports of the ostraka took place during the 2011 and 2013 seasons at the SCA magazine at Ismant (near the site of Kellis), and focused on all fragments found from 2004 to 2013.
Each ostrakon made from pottery has been checked and compared with the remaining pieces comprising the corpus. Additionally, a ceramological study consisting of the classification of the supports according to
