As part of my Easter of business I am giving a paper at the IfA conference in Birmingham on 'The sampling of CBM'. sadly that is the most boring title in the session - I must be loosing my touch or trying to hard at this multi tasking lark!

Anyhow the opening of the paper is a very quick summary of the potential of CBM - because we need to have a clear idea about what we are asking before we ask the question. ('How can we find anything if we don't know what we are looking for?' to paraphase Kant)

and one of the examples I'm interested in is supply - in the later Roman Period in Britain we see the rise of a few regionally dominant industries (after a much more locally based industry with itinerant tile makers up to the early 2nd)

I have now identified Crambeck, Horningsea, Harrold, Holme-on-Spalding Moor and Towcester pink grog tempered manufacturies. For the latter Jeremy Taylor has produced a  distribution for the pottery in this fabric (JRPS4) over which I have overlaid the fabric proportions from sites in which I have identified the same fabric in CBM - both roof tile and flue tile - shown above.

The distribution match quite nicely , although I would like to have a few more points in the distribution map. I will also need to do further work on what specific CBM forms are being distributed, and with what pottery forms. Given that the unit of distribution is the roof load, or the hypocaust load, I wouldn't expect distribution pattens to be the same as for pottery - perhaps much more stepped - and there is the intriguing question of which product is being shipped with what - or is it more complicated than that?

Anyway the main point is that these late Roman tiles are the last roofing in the Roman period - the buildings are deserted and collapse or are demolished, so the majority of the tile is in the tip soil - two of the projects above are field walking surveys, which suggests that excavating topsoil and keeping the roof tiles is actually a useful thing to do. Not too sure how persuadable field specialists would be on this topic.

This on Medieval new towns

http://awhitinghistory.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/who-created-the-medieval-new-towns/

would be fun to compare with the development of Roman towns

This on the Roman Urban mind

http://historyoftheancientworld.com/2013/02/the-fall-and-decline-of-the-roman-urban-mind/

rather western centric for my usual tastes but sesm to link up with waht we have been trying to do with Ceramascene approach

This on the culture of bathing in Roman Palestine

http://historyoftheancientworld.com/2013/02/from-rejection-to-incorporation-the-roman-bathing-culture-in-palestine/

and this fun piece on a well travelled Roman Brick

http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/1-kitty-2-empires-2-000-years-world-history-told-through-a-brick/273320/

A few recent jobs have me looking at some very modern bricks ( well 19th century.) The stamps alone are hinting at a very interesting story about the development of brick makers in the 19th century - there are lots of small businesses, shome over the course of time are often partnered by their offspring, along with other brick makers. Some brick-makers have fingers in other peoples pies. There are also fluctuations of ownership of the clay fields and brick works. The quite staggering range of different brick makers commissioned to supply bricks for a single building is quite striking. Then at the turn of the 19th / 20th century there appears to be a major consolidation into a few 
The whole setup to my mind makes a nice parallel with how commercial archaeology currently runs, with lots of ultra small companies competing and undercutting each other.Perhaps we can expect the emergence of a few dominant providers in the next few years?
There are a number of useful resources I will peg here in case I get the time to follow this through.in addition to product catalogues
Some Brick stamps
 Information about the coal mines of Durham
and some archives

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.