One aspect of a CM assemblage that is often reported is the presence of animal and human prints.  This is a nice example of a dogprint  from the Hunterian Museum via the BBC website. The comments include this:

I find this item fascinating because of the impressed footprint. I feel that this type of artefact brings us even closer to the people, or in this case the animals, of the past. I can imagine this dog may have been a beloved pet of a Roman or Scot or may have been a stray that wandered around the fort site for scraps.

 

I received Similar comments about the prints I used to illustrate my web report from Sagalassos. Indeed when I have given day schools there is often interest in these tracks from antiquity. There is a nice website showing examples of these prints set up by Will Higgs.

Among animals I have identified are cats dogs, sheep/ goats Donkeys and Cattle. Many other have been noted: from stoats to pigs. Human footprints are often made by a barefoot child or an adult in a hobnailed boot.

One aspect of my work is asking how many tile fragments have these prints on. Unfortunately for many sites there is currently no record of what was not retained, but I am getting together a reasonable database of groups from around the Roman world. Typically we are looking at less than 0.1% of an assemblage having animal prints, although this can vary from fabric to fabric and period to period as well as region to region. In Roman Britain there seems to be an increase un the number of tiles with animal  prints after the third century. In Syria and Lebanon animal prints were very rare – most of what I have seen were on the bricks imported from Constantinople for the bathhouse BEY045. In Carthage there was a very specific local poorly made fabric The largest proportions of anial printed CBM I’ve seen is in Bulgaria. The number of prints from Sagalassos also suggest a high level of printing, but I need to undertake further work on quantified groups in order to establish the actual ratios.

So what does this mean? Well the obvious point is that whoever is producing these tiles is using a lot of space and the number of animal prints to my mind reflects a farm intermittently producing tile as one of many crops. In the Levant we are seeing CBM production of an industrial scale in the coastal Cilician region, with specialised tile manufactories so there are either no animals around or there is space to fence off. The tile drying area. In other places farm activities are more cheek by hoof as it were, with some damage to the Tile crop accepted as part of the payoff of not loosing the space during the tile manufacturing season. 

Publishing

We are at the final stages of getting my thesis published. It will be coming out in the new Archaeopress series: RLAMP which is dedicated to all things ceramic and is peer reviewed which we are hoping will improve the quality of pottery data dissemination. The last year has been spent making some minor alterations ( I have not had time to make a major overhaul) It is a data led thesis but some new (i.e. done whilst I was writing up in 2005) work on thin sectioning of Levantine material needed to be referenced, as well as spotting the typos which have managed to escape notice until now. I also foolishly carried out the initial typesetting to the BAR house style.: like thin sectioning I’m glad I’ve done it but I will leave it to someone else in the future. The RLAMP style is slightly different from the BAR style, and that was done in house at Archaeopress by Rajka Makjanic.

It was however a useful exercise for me in terms of making decisions about what to convert to black and white and what graphs could fit into a column, and which ones needed to go across an entire page. I’ve already experienced others typesetting my reports so that the graphs could not be read (not as bad as having tables of supporting data winnowed away – These are the most important bits of the report!! – sorry I digress). The majority of my output are grey literature reports so I do not worry about producing colour graphs – given that its so difficult to get decent B&W patterns on excel nowadays – but it can make the final transition to full publication a bit more fiddly than would otherwise be the case.

That remains in my memory as the most time consuming part of getting my thesis ready for the world. The last hurdle has been deciding on a cover photo. Ideally it would have been of in situ CBM from a destruction layer at either Carthage or Beirut. I had nothing from Carthage which was of good enough quality – The majority of my work was done in 2000 with an early digital camera which is good for record shots but for a hi res cover shot those pictures just don’t cut the mustard. Reuben Thorpe kindly shared some site pictures from Beirut bathhouse (BEY045) originally from slides, and there were some good shots of  pilae stacks and reused Roman bricks showing the monumentality of it all, but nothing we felt conveyed the contents. I suggested

Something along these lines:



Which was rather hurriedly put together on my copy stand  from the remains of my samples which had not been cut up for thin section.

In the end we went for one from a site produced by Michel Bonifay – I think from the western Mediterranean. It does I think convey the quantity and range  and chaos of a typical CBM assemblage, and hopefully the contents of the book show the ways of combating the entropy of the assemblage and snatching order and structure out of chaos. It also to my mind neatly pastiches the photo of Sigillata which is on the cover of RLAMP 1.

I have been asked to supply some slides for a public lecture based on some of my thoughts on the work I did in Sagalassos last summer.

One of the things that struck me about the assemblage was the range and complexity of the signatures compared to the sites that I usually deal with. There are a number of caveats of course – the material I was looking at was from over a decade’s worth of excavation and only the most complete examples were present. Normally I only have fragment of signatures to deal with - but sometimes I get interesting complete examples, such as this example from a site in Cambridgeshire, which is alos noted at Piddington villa



P signature from Turners hall farm , Cambridgeshire ( work commissioned by Hereford Archaeological Trust)







Normally a signature is found on tegula and has been made using a finger or a stick by the tile maker at the end of the shaping process and when the tile is left for primary drying.  Looking at Shawn Grahams Ex Figlinis I find they must be related to Anepigraphic stamps  - in as much that there is a small range of signatures commonly repeated – so it is a device which has meaning in a specific place and for a short time, of which the most obvious is to identify the tiles made by a specific tile maker when it goes into the kiln ( where several tile makers use the same kiln),  Or to identify the fired tiles of a specific tile maker.  Normally less than 0.1% of the assemblage appears to have any traces of a signature – although I will have to go through my database and check so that I can get proper figures by form type and fabric, so about 1 tie in every 1000 is marked in this way – which nicely agrees with the proportion of relief pattern tiles I found in Leicester shire hall – so we are looking at say one tile in 1000 marked in this way.  One can imagine that tiles are stacked in a kiln to allow batches to be easily differentiated, although I can imagine the logistics could be fraught id more than a couple of tilemakers are using the same kiln, This may explain ( in addition to sampling error) why I have some groups with high signature rates – where kiln design or capacity meant that tile makers had to sign a lot more of their products in order to reclaim the right ones after firing.

Currently I have no numbers for the levels of signed tiles at Sagalassos , but the variation in designs are interesting, as well as the relationship to other markings ( stamps in particular) all suggest a complex economic sector which is organised somewhat differently than those in Britain, Italy or the Levant.