Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Making wine for the Emperor on the Roman imperial estate at Vagnari (Italy) with Maureen Carroll - Ep 38
661 Plays3 years ago
Archaeology and Ale is a monthly series of talks presented by Archaeology in the City, part of the University of Sheffield Archaeology Department’s outreach programme. This month we are proud to host Maureen Carroll speaking on "Making Wine for the Emperor on the Roman Imperial Estate at Vagnari (Italy) with Maureen Carroll". This talk took place on Thursday, April 29th, 2021, online via Google Meets.
Maureen is a Roman archaeologist whose key research interests are Roman burial practices, funerary commemoration, and Roman childhood and family studies. She headed up the British team participating in a large EU-funded multi-national project (DressID) on Roman textiles and clothing, her focus being on dress and identity in funerary portraits on the Rhine and Danube frontiers. A further area of interest is the topic of Roman garden archaeology, on which she has published extensively. More recently, Maureen has studied the role of women in votive religion in early Roman Italy.
She has directed excavations in Germany, Italy, Tunisia, and Britain. Her current fieldwork project, funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust, the Roman Society, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the Rust Family Foundation, is the exploration of a Roman rural estate in imperial possession from the first to the third century A.D. at Vagnari in Puglia (Italy).
For more information about Archaeology in the City’s events and opportunities to get involved, please email [email protected] or visit our website at archinthecity.wordpress.com. You can also find us on Twitter (@archinthecity), Instagram (@archaeointhecity), or Facebook (@archinthecity)
AffiliatesRecommended
Transcript
Introduction to Archaeology Now Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello everyone, and welcome to episode 38 of Archaeology Now.
00:00:33
Speaker
a free monthly archeology talk brought to you by Archeology in the City, the community outreach program from the University of Sheffield's Department of Archeology. This month, our guest speaker is Maureen Carroll, speaking about making wine for the emperor on the Roman imperial state at Bagnari, Italy. Due to current COVID-19 restrictions, this talk is taking place online via Google Meets, so there may be some background noise or audio feedback in our recording. Please note that there are images available for you to browse at your leisure. Enjoy!
00:01:12
Speaker
This
Background on Bagnari Excavation
00:01:13
Speaker
excavation has been ongoing basically since 2011. The last field season was 2018. Little did I know that when I chose that year to have a study season the following year to catalogue and work on all the finds that that was absolutely very well placed because if I'd intended to go back digging in 2020 or 2021 it wouldn't have been possible.
00:01:36
Speaker
So it is a work in progress right now. The edited binary volume is in the making and a number of papers are appearing very shortly in various journals. So now is the time after all the work in the field, productive time when we make sense of what we found and start disseminating that knowledge. So I'm going to be talking about a specific aspect of the imperial estate, something that I've been working on quite a bit in the last months. And that's making wine for the emperor.
00:02:06
Speaker
And I'm going to start the PowerPoint here by backtracking a little bit and setting the scene for the imperial estate. Now, this map will show you where the site is located. It is, in fact, on the larger map, the little red temple is the site of Banyuri. And it lies in modern-day Puglia, ancient Apuglia, in the southeastern part of the Italian peninsula, as the small map indicates.
00:02:32
Speaker
In
Italic and Greek Interactions in Apulia
00:02:33
Speaker
the pre-Roman period, at least from about 600 B.C., this is an area of Italy that's inhabited by various Italic ethnic groups, independent groups, some of them having contact with Greek colonies along the southern coast of Italy in Magna Graecia.
00:02:49
Speaker
But by the 4th century BC, increasingly, Rome coming from the northwest is encroaching on this territory and not always peacefully. And this is when we find conflicts starting to happen between the indigenous italic groups.
00:03:05
Speaker
in Apulia and Rome. Now you can see that there are different ethnic groups here. There are the downy. These are the sites at the top that are indicated with blue dots. There are the Poiketi, the sites with the yellow dots, and one of their main settlements was
00:03:22
Speaker
at Silvium Botromagno, where you see the yellow column. The Massapi are these peoples down at the very southern end in black, and then the Lucani, a modern-day basilicata with the red sights. They're all independent of each other. And in amongst some of these settlements down here on the Ionian Gulf, on the Ionian Sea, are various Greek settlements. So you have a bit of Greek colonization, but largely it's limited to the coastal regions.
00:03:52
Speaker
Now the
Pre-Roman Settlements and Archaeology
00:03:53
Speaker
site of Silvium, modern-day Botromania, known today less so for the archaeology, I suppose, amongst the general public, more for its wine. You can see Botromania, the site of ancient Silvium, in the background on the other side of the ravine during the summer and in the winter. And up on the top there is where the settlement was. It's an extremely large settlement occupied for about three or four hundred years prior to the Roman conquest.
00:04:19
Speaker
And at the foot of the hill across the ravine are a number of chamber tombs and some of the images at the bottom show you some of the pre-Roman finds that have come from these tombs, including typical italic burials where men are equipped with armour. Here's one of the helmets found in one of the graves. Also very large red figure vases, some of them coming from Athens, but most of them coming from red figure workshops in Apulia, so-called Apulian red figureware.
00:04:46
Speaker
So the graves are probably better known here at Silvium and Bottomanio, archaeologically, than the settlement itself. But this is the main settlement of the Porchetti. Now, the third century is a place, I think, that probably the Porchetti and anyone else who lived in southeast Italy would
Roman Expansion and Colonization
00:05:05
Speaker
not have enjoyed very much.
00:05:07
Speaker
The Romans come into contact when they're expanding south with the Samnites who live in the central part of Italy and they're also expanding south. So Silvium is taken by the Samnites but the Romans do not tolerate that and in pursuing the Samnites they attack Silvium, Bottomanio, and defeat the city in 306 BC and take thousands of prisoners.
00:05:30
Speaker
Then in the early third century, we have a number of different groups vying for power in the southeast. Tarantum, right at the top of the heel of the boot, an ancient Greek colony, is at war with Rome, and Tarantum employs the help of Pyrrhus of Epirus, and he campaigns around through the south for a while, defeating a number of Roman armies, but in the end, overstretching himself and having to return to Epirus.
00:05:58
Speaker
Also in the third century you have the campaigns of the Carthaginians and you can see Hannibal's route here in the Second Punic War. There is a lot of action in southern Italy, some major battles fought very close to the site where we excavate.
00:06:14
Speaker
Some of the italic and Greek communities in southern Italy sided with Hannibal against Rome. Of course we know the story that Hannibal lost, Carthage was defeated and of course those italic cities that had sided with Hannibal suffered thereafter because there were retributions.
00:06:31
Speaker
So the result, particularly from the late fourth and in the third century, was much disruption, confiscation of territory, and there were many punishments meted out, and Roman veterans settled in confiscated land. Much of the land in southeast Italy became a Roman state land, Agapublicus. That means it was expropriated from the indigenous population and became the property of the state officially.
00:06:55
Speaker
But those are really just the bare bones of maps, dates of battles, names of generals, etc. And it's only archaeology really that allows us to put some flesh on these bones and begin to understand the profound transformation politically, socially
Roman Infrastructure and Control
00:07:09
Speaker
and economically in southern Italy.
00:07:11
Speaker
So in the first century BC, we can see on the ground archaeological evidence for this disruption. As I mentioned a minute ago, Silvium here on the map, Gravina Botromagno is Silvium, was sacked in 306 BC.
00:07:27
Speaker
but excavations there indicate that it was abandoned in the third century after that. There are a number of other sites that probably were small rural settlements dependent on Silvium, such as one here at Yatsofonasiello, which has been excavated by the University of Milan. And it's clear that that also was abandoned at the latest in the early third century in the wake of the conquest of Silvium. Vanyuri, you can see where the Red Temple is on the Vanyuri plateau.
00:07:56
Speaker
There were surveys done and surface collection and, of course, our excavation. And all of this indicates that there was a settlement on the plateau at Banyuri, but it too was abandoned in the third century. Likewise, a little further up the hill at San Felice.
00:08:12
Speaker
a settlement that goes back probably to the 6th century BC is also abandoned in the 3rd century and likewise another site nearby Monti Iosse is abandoned in the 3rd century. So we're starting to get a picture of widespread abandonment in the wake of the sack of Silvium and we know this only because of more recent archaeological exploration.
00:08:36
Speaker
In the decades following the Roman conquest, the road network, in particular the Via Appia, which commences in Rome, was extended to the east coast. This is the white line, the Via Appia here, and along it were planted Roman colonies. They are planted all along the route from Rome, along the west coast, and then crossing the Apennines over to the east coast. The Roman colonies in yellow are those colonies that are established
00:09:03
Speaker
in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC after the conquest of Apulia. The pink colonies are older
Agrarian Reforms and Economic Growth
00:09:10
Speaker
and go back to at least the 4th century and you can see the logic of the Via Apia at one time extending Roman contact from the west to the east coast and then consolidating its hold on the land by establishing colonies occupied by Roman citizens. So it's a two-pronged attack and it worked very well in holding the land for Rome.
00:09:33
Speaker
After the battles with Hannibal, some of these Roman colonies in the south, like Venusia or Venosa, north of Vanyere here, was depleted. They'd lost a lot of men in the war. Of course, Venusia was on the side of Rome. The colonists had to be replenished and new citizens and funds were invested to refurbish Venusia.
00:09:56
Speaker
Now, on the eastern coast, there is quite a lot of recent archaeological evidence, thanks to the state and university archaeologists in Apulia who do really a very stellar job of exploring the countryside. We can see that the land, probably in the second century BC, under Roman supervision, the land begins to be parceled out into equal sizes. This is what we refer to as centuriation.
00:10:24
Speaker
It's part of the Roman agrarian reforms in the second century BC and you'll notice that a lot of the centurionation, that's the grid here, is located in this fertile eastern section along the coast where we have lots of vineyards and olive groves. These are the two products that come primarily from this region.
00:10:45
Speaker
Now this is in part a place where land is occupied by Roman aristocrats with large land holdings and small peasant land holdings declined. Economic opportunities obviously opened up for the Romans after the conquest, especially for this fertile Adriatic coastal region and of course the exports went across the Adriatic.
00:11:08
Speaker
in particular from the new Roman colony of Brindisium and we can see here on the map that some of the products from Brindisium from Apulia where they've been found. They've been found as far west as Spain and as far east along the Nile and also in Israel.
00:11:26
Speaker
In the aerial surveys and excavation of the region, we also have lots of evidence for these farms or estates, what they look like, sometimes even so well preserved that we can see plantings of vines and trees and orchards and so on, producing the exports that left the country.
00:11:42
Speaker
Accompanying that are a number of sites where we have lots of amphora production, in particular for the wine and for the olive oil that comes from this area and those are of course the markers of the vast extent of export from southeast Italy at this time. You can see the Via Appia here going very close to the site of Vanyuri and going very close to Silvium Botromagnum.
00:12:06
Speaker
So we have Centuriation here, we have new Roman towns, we have new Roman colonies. But further west, where in central Apulia, where Vanyuri is located, there were no colonies and only some very small towns. And therefore, this area has been a little bit neglected and it is our excavations that are shedding quite a bit of light on what is happening in this underexplored region.
00:12:30
Speaker
Our excavations
Roman Resettlement and Cultural Influence
00:12:31
Speaker
have shown that in the second century BC, Vanry was resettled after a hiatus of about 100 years. And we can date that very carefully because of the material culture. And on the screen, you can see some of the typical grey gloss wear. And that is typical of the second and the first centuries BC. Here are some of the vessel shapes, a grey gloss lamp, which are on Kelsey Madness.
00:12:56
Speaker
is holding here as a site supervisor at Vanry. We have loom weights, perfume flasks, lots of metal and so on. All of this dating to the second century. So we know that something new is being established here after this hiatus.
00:13:10
Speaker
and it's occupied till about the mid or the late first century BC. There's resuscitation elsewhere at Silvium after it was sacked in 306. In the second half of the second century BC excavations have shown that a new villa with subsidiary buildings is erected.
00:13:27
Speaker
And the focus here is on weaving, making textiles, because we are in an old trans-humans region here where wool is really important. But this is settled by new settlers. This is not the Poiketi any longer. And the settlement there goes on to about 80 or 70 BC. And Monteersi, another site that I showed on another map, is also resuscitated in the second half of the second century with a new villa built over the indigenous remains.
00:13:52
Speaker
of the 3rd century BC. So we can see that there is life coming into the region and perhaps this is an influx of newcomers, perhaps Romans from Italy, I mean from from Rome and elsewhere in Italy, not necessarily any of the former locals. Now the site of Vanyuri was discovered through field walking and surface collection by Kerala and Alastair Small in 2000 and it was the focus of excavations under my direction from 2011.
00:14:22
Speaker
The retrieval here and in the immediate surroundings of Vanry of ceramic roof tiles stamped with the name of a workshop master who was an imperial slave. You can see two of them at the bottom indicates that this territory and its central settlement at Vanry were indeed the property of the Roman emperor himself. Now, this happens sometime in the early first century AD, so we have
00:14:49
Speaker
the Iron Age indigenous settlement at Vanyuri abandoned in the 3rd century, a new Roman settlement created in the 2nd century, which then gets abandoned in the 1st century BC, and then we have a new settlement on the same site that is Roman imperial and dates to the early 1st century AD.
00:15:07
Speaker
Now I will explain this map here because it might look a little bit confusing. You can see the Basantello River here which flows into the Ionian Sea and the Pentecia River here, Silvium located. Here in green is the old ancient drove way. Here's another drove way. I mentioned that we're in a transhuman zone that had been
00:15:28
Speaker
practice for a very long time. And Field Survey, picking up a roof tile and whatever else was lying on the surface because of ploughing, has suggested that the imperial estate might have occupied an area that was at least 25 to 30 square kilometres in size and perhaps a bit bigger.
00:15:46
Speaker
The purple is the Via Apia going right through the Imperial Estate. So you can see that the location is actually quite advantageous. It's on the intersection of two ancient drove roads, leading from west to east and from south to north. It's on the Via Apia and it's also closely associated with rivers, even if they're not very large. And we're not sure that they were navigable here, but they could have been used for transporting something.
00:16:10
Speaker
So that's the imperial estate and we know it's imperial because of these slaves who belonged to the emperor. This is the site of Vanry. In principle, this is how Vanry and the landscape here looks every summer after the grain has been harvested in early July.
00:16:27
Speaker
In this particular year,
Imperial Estate's Role in Agriculture
00:16:30
Speaker
instead of planting grain on one of the areas, they planted chickpeas, and it's the chickpeas here that are a light yellowy-green that actually highlight the whole plateau on which the village or vicus of Vaneri was located. So we have the vicus on one side of this ravine and the necropolis or cemetery on the other side, and this is looking to the northeast.
00:16:53
Speaker
The excavations have produced a lot of evidence for the northwestern corner of the Vicus, a rather murky looking resistivity survey plot out on the right. I've highlighted in red the area that we've actually excavated.
00:17:10
Speaker
and tried to connect it with some of the other walls that were excavated by Alistair Small and by the features that show up in the resistivity survey. So all in all, this is what we have excavated and we have determined that there are six different phases of occupation and building here.
00:17:31
Speaker
One thing that we have been able to ascertain is that the imperial settlement in the first century AD was not without some luxury. It's often been thought that the Vicus here would have been a very utilitarian settlement, and it was. It's there for one purpose and one purpose only, and that's to raise revenues for the imperial coffers.
00:17:53
Speaker
There is no villa here. There is no luxurious residence. I'm quite sure that none of the emperors ever set foot at Vanry. It's a place where the workers of the estate live and where the administration is based. But it's not without some luxury. So in the early first century AD, when the imperial settlement, the Vicus, is established, we can see rather well-built stone walls being constructed. We have things like stone-built drains very carefully constructed.
00:18:19
Speaker
We have marble inlays, probably floors and wall coverings, one fragment of a marble mosaic. These things do not suggest some sort of mean, poorly appointed settlement. And we have very large panes of window glass, potentially up to 40 or 60 centimeters in width and length.
00:18:37
Speaker
And they're actually quite rare on Roman sites in Italy, so that's another indication of some luxury. And we also have evidence for tiles, and they look like a piece of a pie, segmental tiles. When put together, they create a circle and then they can be plastered and painted, and they look like marble. Of course, they're a much cheaper version. But it does suggest that some buildings here at least must have had columns, perhaps porches overlooking the Via Appia and the landscape, we're not certain.
00:19:06
Speaker
So we know that the imperial settlement, the Vicus, is established in the early first century BC, thanks to the material culture and thanks to the epigraphy on the stamps. But how precisely the imperial estate at Vanjour was created is unclear. It could have been bequeathed to the emperor by an aristocrat who owned the land before him.
00:19:25
Speaker
It could have been donated to him, or of course it could be simply a confiscation, an imperial confiscation. Or what the other possibility is, because this is Roman state land Agapublicus, that the emperor simply detaches a large piece of that for himself.
00:19:41
Speaker
Now, in other places in Apulian and neighbouring Lukaenia, we have the first Roman villas appearing in the second half of the first century BC and early first century AD, about the same time as this. And some of them demonstrably belong to the elite and even members of the imperial family.
00:19:57
Speaker
And sometimes you'll read in the literature that if you have things like marble mosaics, columns, window glass and so on, these are an indication that they're not indigenous local settlers, but that they are higher status Romans who are attracted to the area for economic advancement.
00:20:14
Speaker
Well, as I said, there's no sign of a villa here, and I don't think it will ever be found. So we might ask whether some of the signs of luxury, if you want to think of them that way, at the Vicus, prompt us to debate whether they really are signs of a villa, or if also a village like Vanyri that belongs to the Emperor could be a place for social stratification through building materials and layout.
00:20:37
Speaker
By the second century AD the focus of the settlement appears to be on agricultural production with the erection of utilitarian structures of much plainer character. So the first century is a little bit more high status perhaps, the second century it's all geared towards production and earning money for the emperor. There can be little doubt that this settlement was created to raise revenues for the imperial purse largely through agriculture.
00:21:02
Speaker
At Vanry for
Innovations in Grain Cultivation
00:21:03
Speaker
the Imperial period, there's evidence of substantial cereal cultivation. And if we look at Varro writing on agriculture in the first century B.C., he highlights, in fact, that Apulia is a place where very good wheat comes from. He says there are regions that are particularly good for certain agricultural products.
00:21:23
Speaker
spelt from Campania, which I've highlighted here with a red diamond, wheat from Apulia with the pink diamond, wine, the Fulamian, of course, is the very best. That's the brown diamond, and olive oil. Vanaffron is the best, and that's the blue diamond. The green star, of course, is Rome.
00:21:42
Speaker
So Apulia is known for its productive soil and its grain produce. There's evidence for diversity in cereal cultivation here at Manary. Matt Stern and Rebecca Skurros, two former graduates of the University of Sheffield Archaeology Department, determined that there are multiple types of grain that were being grown at the same time, including free thrashing wheat, gloom wheat,
00:22:06
Speaker
and barley all on the same estate. But this changes over time and I've just to simplify that given some of the abbreviations on the lower right. So in the first century AD it's mostly gloom wheats spelt emmer and einkorn followed by barley and free thrashing wheat. By the second century gloom wheats maintain a majority still
00:22:26
Speaker
But free thrashing wheat increases and more prevalent than barley. And by the third century AD, and I think this might be the period of the greatest grain production in Apulia, we have free thrashing wheat being most prevalent with some gloom wheat and barley simply as a minority.
00:22:45
Speaker
So this system would have required substantial labour and manpower, considering that these various species are processed in different ways and stored in different processes. So it's unclear, but it may be that the crop diversity practiced at Vanyuri was an insurance against climatic variability or was a preventative measure to hamper soil erosion, which is a real problem still today.
00:23:09
Speaker
At any rate, it reflects an advanced knowledge of farming in the landscape of southern Italy. We have lots of grain storage pits. In fact, for the first century AD, even if we can't recognise the remnants of walls, we can figure out more or less where rooms work because these grain storage pits, which I've highlighted in blue on the plan here, are arranged inside rooms along the foot of the walls.
00:23:33
Speaker
right up against the interior walls as you can see along here. They're all lined up here, lined up here. This is topped later by a different wall, but you can see that there are a lot of these pits. A couple of them still had the ceramic
00:23:49
Speaker
storage pithos or dolium in it, and some of them had mortar lining, the dolium is gone, but you can see the the impression of the flat base. Those pits are then backfilled with all manner of refuse at the end of the first century AD, so the grain storage pits are used throughout the first century AD.
00:24:08
Speaker
and then they're given up. And that's because I think they're building purpose-built granaries elsewhere on site to store much larger quantities of grain when the estate gears up to producing more wheat. So these are things that are for immediate consumption. This is not grain storage that suggests a great export. This is probably for local consumption.
00:24:30
Speaker
Another staple of the Vanuar economy was sheep grazing for the production of wool and another ex Sheffield student Angela Trent-Acosta has been looking at the animal bones from Vanuar and exploring also Roman transhumans and the practice of driving sheep in the spring to the mountains then back to the lowlands in autumn.
00:24:51
Speaker
And it's Vero, who again wrote about agriculture in the first century BC, who tells us that he had himself flocks of sheep, who spent the winter in Apulia, and the summer in Latium. And they were driven back and forth along these droveways, and you can see a number of the known droveways down here as well.
00:25:11
Speaker
Again, here we have Van Dury nestled in between these two drove waves, meaning it's very well connected. Van Dury tells us, of course, that he reports the flocks that are driven by shepherds back and forth and pays taxes because otherwise you'd be in trouble with the law.
00:25:28
Speaker
So the Roman government might be sitting in Rome, but it's controlling things like transhumans, even down here in southeast Italy. So Vannery's location producing, I think, the flocks or the place where the sheeps are shorn to get the wool. I'll take advantage of the droveways from Leucania here from the west and from Tarentum in the south.
00:25:51
Speaker
heading north. Carnusium is a big textile centre in their own period. Venusia less so and so is Tarentum. So, Banuri is actually really well placed to manage the flocks of sheep and to be a main manager of the shearing of sheep and the production of wool.
00:26:11
Speaker
But from the second century AD, wool textile production here in the South seems to have become less significant and the land at Varnary then goes into more grain production. Because by the second century AD, these sites up here in the foothills of the Alps in northern Italy become rather better exploited for wool and it has a very high reputation. So we can see a change in regime from
00:26:37
Speaker
transhumans being replaced not entirely, but substantially by the production of grain. And
Establishment of Winery at Bagnari
00:26:43
Speaker
so I'm going to move on to the production of wine, which is the main focus tonight. Now, we had no idea before we started dating here that there were vineyards at binary or anywhere on the imperial estate, because we've unearthed the very first evidence of wine production at the Roman site, but also in the early second century site, there's no evidence of wine production either.
00:27:03
Speaker
And what we uncovered was a salivinaria and that's a winery, a room that in this case has a mortar floor into which very large storage vessels, dolia, such as these two here are sunk. You can see I've highlighted some of them here, some of them were robbed out, some were still in situ.
00:27:22
Speaker
And I'll return to this at the end, that there would have been room for more, possibly up to 18, but we uncovered examples numbering 10. This is a second century addition to the vicus. So when the grain production is upped,
00:27:39
Speaker
we find that the estate managers are diversifying a little bit here by also practicing viniculture. The salivinaria is used until around AD 200, so only for about a century. It might have been moved to another spot or just given up, we're not sure. Now these dolia defosa, that means buried dolia, were sunk into the ground up to their necks to keep the temperature of the wine constant and cool.
00:28:06
Speaker
This is a necessary measure in hot climate zones and Pliny the Elder writes about this. They were lined with pitch and agrarian writers prescribed this and in fact you can see a couple of the sherds here. This is the outer surface of the sherd and you can see how the pitch has just penetrated the surface of the fabric of the vessel, here it is, and kept the wine fresh. I kept it from from going off
00:28:32
Speaker
and also kept the wine from leaking or seeping into the fabric of the vessels. Ben Stone from Bradford University conducted this residue analysis and the lining of the dolio with pitch was so successful, unfortunately for us, that we could not find any evidence of wine markers like tartaric acid in the fabric because the wine simply didn't migrate into the walls of the vessels.
00:29:00
Speaker
Now, these dolia are actually really large. They come in sizes from anywhere between 400 liters capacity to about 1,000, the ones that are fixed permanently, wineries. They're a considerable capital investment, as of course are the vines that would need to be planted, and the personnel needed to bring the vines to fruition. They have to be tended for years before they start to bear fruit and bring financial returns.
00:29:27
Speaker
So setting up a winery was not done on the whim of the emperor or his estate managers. It would have required a lot of investment.
00:29:37
Speaker
And here is our 3D reconstruction of the Cellar Vennaria as we see it nestled into the northwest corner of the Vicus building. We don't know where the vineyards were. Unfortunately, we don't have this kind of evidence where you can see the plantings of vines in the soil. This is a Roman vineyard near Bordeaux. I wish we did, but we don't.
00:29:57
Speaker
Anyway, these very large dolia, they stay in the ground for perhaps decades. They could easily be in the ground and being reused every year for the new vintage for 40 years. That's entirely possible. These dolia often need repairs. They're very difficult to make and cracks can form while they're being fired in the kiln or so soon thereafter. And they often need pairs. And here's a couple of very good ones found today in Rome and Herculaneum.
00:30:24
Speaker
and you can see that they're usually repaired using lead clamps, a mixture of lead paste or liquid lead poured into the cracks, then holes drilled on either side of the cracks and liquid lead or lead clamps inserted and then all sealed up. And they really seem to have done the trick and they're present on most dolia that have been in use in the ground for a long time.
00:30:47
Speaker
Wine cellars like this Salivinarii are known throughout Italy and they have anywhere between a dozen and 40 or more dolia. They're known on private farms elsewhere in Italy, also in the Mediterranean. Quite a few of them are known on the south coast of France and in Spain. And they usually these vessels have a capacity of between 500 or even a thousand litres.
00:31:11
Speaker
Of course, anywhere near Vesuvius, these things survive in miraculous condition as they do here in this modest winery at Boscoreale outside Pompeii. And you can see them as
Wine Production Techniques
00:31:22
Speaker
they were found covered by the debris from Vesuvius in 79 AD and as they've been excavated here, buried into the ground up to their necks with a lid and then with a second lid on top. Now these wineries are open to the sky and so the double lid system protects them from the sun and
00:31:40
Speaker
the heat and inclement weather too, I think. Some of the Suviana, that was a surprise discovery just upon the slopes of Mount Vesuvius recently found, but we also have wine storage dolia at Ostia, for example, outside Rome, and a number of estates in Apulia where the wine that was exported was produced. And you can see an aerial view here of one of the wineries and the negatives left from where the dolia were.
00:32:07
Speaker
These are for bulk storage and we have a number of other sources that we can use to explore them. On the upper left you have a funerary relief, probably of the second century AD, now in Liverpool, depicting a man and a woman, certainly a married couple, clasping hands and in the background you can see their winery.
00:32:29
Speaker
And the dolia are easily recognizable. And we have a simplified version of the workmen taking wine out of the dolia and putting them into the smaller transport amphora. And those are what traveled carrying the contents of the dolia. The ceramic lids, here's another one at the top, didn't always survive and not always were the lids made of ceramics. So, for example, if we look at this relief, we can see wooden lids. You can see the slats here. That's quite clear.
00:32:55
Speaker
But it's also quite interesting to look at modern parallels for this because in Georgia and some parts of Sicily now, there are experiments in making wine in their own fashion using dolia sunk into the ground, much as it was made in antiquity.
00:33:11
Speaker
The image on the lower right just gives you the scale between one of the storage vessels never used for transport from the winery and the transport vessels themselves, the amphorae. So one of these dolia could hold several dozen, the equivalent of several dozen, up to perhaps even 90 or more amphorae of wine. These ceramic vessels were manufactured clearly by very accomplished specialists for the specific task of storage for large quantities of wine.
00:33:38
Speaker
And unfortunately, we don't have any ancient Roman workshop data on how they were made. But there is recent information, because we have this site here, La Terracote del Vino. It also has its own website where they're making replica ceramic dolium. Here's one. And where they describe what it involves to make a dolium of this size.
00:33:59
Speaker
So after reading this, I found it very insightful for understanding what difficult and highly skilled vessels we have. These are vessels of 500-litre capacity. The workshop's near Florence. They're built, coil-built, as are our Roman dolia, over 15 to 20 days. You just add a coil a day and let it dry. It's very slow.
00:34:23
Speaker
Another month is then needed to dry them in preparation in storage rooms for firing at a thousand degrees centigrade in large kilns. So we can see that it's a very tricky process. You have to know what you're doing. Things have to dry properly. You have to build huge kilns to accommodate them and an absolute awe and respect of any of these dolium manufacturers.
00:34:47
Speaker
We also have more recent experiments being conducted in Spain by this project, the Salavinaria project, where kilns on the left are created so that dolia can be fired in them. Here's one of the products of a modern firing, but we can see 100 years ago, there are ethnographic parallels in Greece and in Spain for making these very large vessels.
00:35:09
Speaker
and firing them in very large kilns. So that kind of information is very useful in trying to understand what the making of a Roman dolium involved.
Dolia Production and Trade
00:35:19
Speaker
Now, you might think that the dolia that are found in the winery at Vanry were locally produced. That would make sense. We are not very far from the Adriatic coast, where there are specialists in making amphorae, where we have the vineyards, etc. So you would think that the dolii would come from there.
00:35:36
Speaker
And this would make sense from the normal economic perspective. You wouldn't have long transport routes or high costs for them. But a British Academy funded fabric analysis by Giuseppe Montana and Luciano Randazzo at the universities of Palau and Calabria instead shows that the dolier were made on the west coast of Italy.
00:35:56
Speaker
They might have been made in the Roman magmatic province, which I've highlighted here in turquoise with Rome. So it's the whole Tiber Valley, the hinterland of Rome. I should say what gives us the clue of where our dolio were made is, of course, that the vessel fabric is tempered with volcanic particles. And it can be determined where those volcanic particles were, where the volcanoes were.
00:36:23
Speaker
And they suggest that the vessels are made on the west coast, the Turanian coast of Italy, either in the Roman magmatic province here in the Hinterland of Rome, or in the Anicci-Rocamonfina volcanic province that's here in green, with Minturnae as the main site, its key site.
00:36:44
Speaker
But the analysis has shown that the best match for them is the Anichie-Rocamonfina volcano, so this region here with Minturnae as its key site. Minturnae lies on the ancient Liri River, the modern Garyliano.
00:37:01
Speaker
and it flows from the interior, the Apennines, down to the sea. The tempera, of course, partly would have come from the Rokomonfina volcano, which you can see here, and this is a prime vineyard and wine-growing territory even today.
00:37:16
Speaker
This is the Galliano and right here in the background is the Roman colony of Minturnae in a very pivotal position with a very fertile and rich hinterland wine growing located also on a river with access to the sea. The results of this study have been accepted by the Journal of Archaeological Science reports and I expect that that will be out in the next weeks.
00:37:40
Speaker
Now those are the dolia that are fixed into a wine cellar and they stay in a wine cellar, they don't move around but we also have another category and another version of the dolia and these are the truly enormous wine dolia
00:37:55
Speaker
with a capacity of up to 3,000 litres of wine, which were used for bulk transport of wine, probably of table quality from Italy and primarily across the Mediterranean to Southern Gaul, to Southern France and to Spain. A number of these vessels, you can see some of the very large ones here. I'm standing looking a little bit stunned next to the size of these vessels. Here is the size of one that you'd find in a winery floor, and these are the up to 3,000-litre giants.
00:38:22
Speaker
They have quite often maker's stamps on them. You can see two down at the bottom. And we know from epigraphic sources that many of the names of the proprietors of these kilns or the gigantic dolia lived in and around Minturnae.
00:38:38
Speaker
So it gives us that kind of independent confirmation, in addition to the fabric analysis, that this is the place where dolia were made. These very large transport dolia were inserted into ships that were specially made for the transport dolia, and these ships are also made at Mintu and I on the Gavigliano River.
00:38:59
Speaker
Ship sheds have been found there and we find the products on these wine tankers plying the western Mediterranean. We find a number of shipwrecks. I think there are 13 of them known thus far, all dating to about the mid first century BC to the mid first century AD, maybe to the end of the first century AD.
00:39:18
Speaker
So we have the fabric analysis, we have the stamps on the vessels, and we have some of the same names of these enterprising families also preserved on inscriptions in Minturnae itself by various tax collectors and magistrates and so on. So altogether we can make a very good case for the vessels coming from Minturnae.
00:39:39
Speaker
But as I indicated, not just these gigantic dolia for bulk transport were made at Mintua night, but also the winery size ones. A couple of them have been found on estates north of Rome, but as far as I know, our estate down here in Apulia is the only one that's ever been found away from the western coast of Italy.
00:39:59
Speaker
By
Minturnae as a Wine Hub
00:40:00
Speaker
the way, I should say that these very large transport dolia were never removed from the ship. The wine in them is simply siphoned out at the destination and then put in different vessels. They did not leave the ship, unlike amphorae, which of course are loaded and unloaded, and travel around a lot more. What do we know about Minturnae? This is actually really rather intriguing to think that we have products from Minturnae, the west coast, being used in a winery on the east coast, obviously.
00:40:26
Speaker
Well, Minto and I, during the second and first centuries BC, was a very prosperous place. It's a Roman colony. It's on the Via Apia, one of those pink-starred colonies that I showed you in the satellite image, founded in 295 BC. It's, of course, fortuitously located on the mouth of the river with agricultural land and forests and its hinterland in the mountains. Very good for shipbuilding.
00:40:51
Speaker
an image on the lower left of part of the city of Mintornae. Most of it still lies under vineyards and orchards. And here's the Garelian or the ancient Lyris river flowing right next to it. And this, in fact, is the Via Apia, which goes right through the middle of the colony.
00:41:07
Speaker
The estates in the hinterland of the Roman towns of Mintulinae, Sinoessa, and Fundi, to name a few in this region, all located near the river and near the volcanoes that provide not only the ash for the good soil, but also the temper for the dolia. These estates, we know, belong to many Roman elites from the city of Rome, including some of the families of the emperors themselves.
00:41:37
Speaker
and it's certain that many of them were in the business of commercial wine production, and it could very well be that estates belonging to the emperor here were producing wine as well, although we're still lacking the epigraphic evidence for that.
00:41:52
Speaker
But the wine that grows in this region, you can see on this map here, Phalaenian, Cacuban, these are some of the very finest wines in antiquity. So it is a very large wine producing area. And in fact, the mosaic on the floor of one of the bath buildings in the center of Mintona shows some cherubs and tromping on grapes to produce juice flowing into Dolia. So wine producing and Dolia are even emblematic of the city and can be seen in this context.
00:42:21
Speaker
Mintu and I is very, very well connected. It's connected to Spain. We know that through various coin series. And of course, the wine, the bulk wine is going across to Spain. So there's a toing and froing of wine and other commodities back and forth. The families, the rich slave owning families of Mintu and I also have connections to Delos, to the eastern Mediterranean, where we have the families named epigraphically.
00:42:48
Speaker
So they seem to be sometimes dealing in wine and sometimes dealing in slaves and perhaps often dealing in both. So we have several businesses making the large dolier for these tankers to supply the wine, but we also have businesses making the dolier for the wineries themselves. Unfortunately, we have not found any workshops or production facilities archaeologically outside of Mintua 9, although amphora workshops have
00:43:17
Speaker
So the research on the Vanuaridolia is an important step in understanding how the dolium industry, if you like, in central Italy was organized, how the vessels were deployed and the routes taken to transport them to their destinations, either as transport vessels or as production and storage vessels.
00:43:35
Speaker
What would really be good is if we could have an archaeometric analysis of land and sea finds, a larger program, and I think we'd find that quite a lot of the dolio we know, we could prove that they do come from the Mintu and I. The little blue ships here, I had lots of fun learning how to use symbols whilst doing this PowerPoint, and these are just some of the dolium shipwreck finds that contain dolio from Mintu and I.
00:44:00
Speaker
Now the dolium makers or the builders of the wine tanker ships in Mintur and I were not the producers of the wine. We have to separate them. The regional wine growers produced the wine and their product was then entrusted to the transporters and traders who bought the wine from the dolia and decanted it into amphorae. Once out of
Economic Networks of Wine Trade
00:44:22
Speaker
the dolia, the wine belonged to the trader, no longer to the vineyard owner.
00:44:26
Speaker
Now, normally, as I suggested earlier, in regions where Roman wine was produced in significant quantities, as in southeast Italy on the Adriatic coast, the kilns and workshops for dolia were located at or near the harvesting sites and estates. However, the emperor, or rather the imperial administration or procurator responsible for the estate at Vanyuri, did not procure dolia de fossa for the new winery in the second century from any of the wine or dolia producers in Apulia.
00:44:56
Speaker
Using suppliers for essential and specialist equipment from the Minturni region on the other side of the peninsula makes little sense in this context and it seems excessive and unnecessary unless there were particular reasons to do so. One reason might be that the emperor owned vineyards as well as the heavy ceramics workshops in the territory of Minturni that produced the Dolia de Forza for use on his estate wherever they might be.
00:45:22
Speaker
and therefore also the Dolia themselves. So the Dolia actually belonged to the imperial Fiscus. They belonged to the Emperor if they're produced on his estates. The peak of demand for wine from southern Latium and northern Campania, this region here inside the black box, was in the first centuries BC and AD as the Emperor and Dolia on ships in the western Mediterranean indicate.
00:45:47
Speaker
The markets for Italian wine in the provinces dropped off considerably after that, although we certainly can't say that the wine industry was in crisis in Italy, as the wine producers are still producing for Italy itself. But because wine is no longer exported in such great quantities, perhaps the emperor's properties around Minturnae
00:46:06
Speaker
might have had a surplus of wine vats made in Minto and I that were not needed there. And when the winery and vanery was set up in the second century, some of those dolia were deployed to his imperial estate on the other side of Italy in Apulia. Another scenario, however, is that the imperial fiscus simply purchased the dolia needed for the vanery estate. And perhaps the emperor or his estate manager, when setting up wine production at vanery, simply procured the best equipment available, as any conscientious landowner might have done.
00:46:35
Speaker
and this involved Dolia from the Minto and I region. We simply do not yet know enough about the equipment procurement procedures of imperial properties. And this is one of those, I'd like to say rabbit holes, excuse me, that I'm going down right now, imperial economy, something that is quite a lot of work, but very interesting nonetheless.
00:46:55
Speaker
Roman agricultural writers make clear that they valued some regional products as superior in quality. Cato in the second century BC, for example, advising where to get the best farm equipment seemed to value, above all, dolia made in Rome. He doesn't mention it, do I?
00:47:11
Speaker
That was his judgment relevant to the situation in about 160 BC, and he was writing primarily for landowners around Rome. By the Augustan period, late first century BC, early first century AD, when the gigantic transport dolia and the smaller dolia de fossa were being made around Minturnae, however, the more prolific and respected workshops might have been these around Minturnae and no longer Rome.
00:47:36
Speaker
The output of these workshops in the Minturnae region, probably dotted around the hinterland, up and down the riverbanks, almost certainly near the river, also where the tanker ships are built, may have been quite extensive and their products very widely diffused. Now, it would have obviously required considerable effort to get the dolia from the west coast of Italy to Vanyuri, and it's rather puzzling why such a modest winery as the one at Vanyuri, possibly just producing sufficient wine for the estate inhabitants,
00:48:05
Speaker
would have been outfitted this way, unless perhaps these mentonian products were considered the very best available. So these expensive, complicated and bulky specialist vessels were brought to Banyuri all the way from the west coast, probably on ships for ease of transport, and I've suggested some routes here.
00:48:24
Speaker
So either from Mintoni, around the toe of Italy, up the Ionian Sea, and perhaps shipped up the river as far as it's navigable, and the rest on land, perhaps into the still functioning and busy harbour of Tarentum, and then joining here, as you can see, on the Via Appia, all the way to binary, or perhaps stopping on the east coast at any number of ports along this Adriatic coast. These are all possible.
00:48:49
Speaker
So we've got things, the Dolia themselves, coming from the Garigliano. There's still the small possibility that the Dolia might come from around Rome. I don't think that they do, but they might have been shipped from Rome using the Tiber, that's possible. Coming up the Brodano, that's this river here, that's our other possibility. And one of the major ports here on the Adriatic coast would have been Brindisi.
00:49:12
Speaker
So these are some of the ship routes that are possible, but, you know, I mean, it's it's quite complicated. Mintonae to Brindisium, for example, would have taken eight days by ship. It's over a thousand kilometers. Ostia, the port of Rome, to Brindisium, eight and a half days. That's over 1100 kilometers.
00:49:28
Speaker
But these are long ship journeys, but definitely they make much more sense than, for example, loading these large dolia onto multiple carts, ox driven, going over the mountains with teams of oxen and men to deliver them to Banyuri. It's not profitable and it would have taken much, much longer. So I think the sea route is the one that I would choose.
00:49:54
Speaker
But it's still surprising, considering the modest nature of the winery at Vanyering, that all this effort was gone to.
Self-Sufficiency of Imperial Estate
00:50:01
Speaker
If we compare the Vanyering winery here on the lower, on the upper left, and I've added other dolia that we couldn't find, but there would have been room for them up to 18 potentially.
00:50:10
Speaker
If we compare that with some of the other private wineries on the Bay of Naples, like at Stabiai, Boscoreale, both villas here, it's clear that the winery at Vanieri was modest in size and capacity. If each of the dolier at Vanieri had a capacity of about 500 litres,
00:50:29
Speaker
It would produce between 5,000 litres if there's just 10 dolia or 9,000 litres if there are 18. For this site here, the Villa Regina, which is a modest family-owned farm outside Pompeii, there's calculated 10,000 litres being produced here. So it shows you how modest the Vanierit Winery is and very much like a private one at Stabii.
00:50:53
Speaker
Unlike this one here, outside Pompeii, the Villa della Pisanella, which is calculated to have produced 85,000 litres, a villa clearly whose sole purpose was to produce wine. So we really don't know whether a winery here at Vanyuri was just for the inhabitants of the estate. I think that probably is the case and that might have to do with the imperial estate being self-sufficient. And it might follow hand-in-hand with the idea of
00:51:23
Speaker
things that are in imperial property being exchanged with other imperial properties. So, for example, the dolia belonging to an imperial workshop being shipped to Vaneri, another imperial workshop or site, perhaps that goods and products were exchanged
00:51:39
Speaker
without any money being used. And instead of importing wine from further afield, the bicus at Vanyuri was being self-sufficient in producing wine just for itself. It's not a big wine producer. It's not one of the big exporters.
00:51:53
Speaker
Now, we don't really know the size of the settlement at Vanyuri and so I cannot say for certain that there wasn't a bigger salivinaria or that somewhere perhaps wine was produced in grander style because what we have excavated is on the satellite photo here. You can see the buildings. The yellow indicates the tile scatter that was noted on a field walking survey.
00:52:16
Speaker
However, today, if you're working at the site and you walk down the slopes in any direction, there are still lots and lots of root tiles suggesting that perhaps a larger surface of the plateau was covered with buildings. And we have no way of knowing whether there might be bigger and more capacious storage facilities still awaiting discovery.
00:52:35
Speaker
I'd like to finish with just a couple comments about the role of the estate because I mentioned at the beginning that we have Roman towns. They're highlighted here on this map as blue dots. You can see there's quite a lot of them here along the coast. The countryside has undergone centuriation. The countryside is peopled by lots of villas and employees and slaves and so on who work the land. We also have two
00:52:58
Speaker
two major towns, one is Canosa here, a big textile centre, and Venusia or Venosa, the Roman colony on the Via Appia, and another Roman colony down here at Tarentum. We have the green of the droveways for transhumans, and here's the Via Appia. The pink are very small villages, and you'll notice that although there's a lot of dense settlement around the larger towns and along the coast,
00:53:24
Speaker
Here in this region, in the central part of Apulia, there isn't a lot of settlement going on. And I think because of its location on the Via Apia, located as it is, this very large agricultural estate with its central village would have acted as a hub for the region. Some of
Impact of Imperial Resource Management
00:53:43
Speaker
the towns are very close. Bantia, for example, Bansi is 40 kilometres away.
00:53:48
Speaker
and Ruby Ruvo is over 60 kilometers, and the colony of Vinucia is also 60 kilometers away. So it's an area that isn't densely settled, and the estate hub at Varnieri must have been an essential mechanism by which to provide the population recruited for settlement and employment with public amenities, social cohesion, economic security, and personal opportunity.
00:54:13
Speaker
and the estate, of course, manage the transformation of the region. So the well-documented sequences of occupation and diagnostic assemblages of late republican and imperial date at Vanyuri offer a fresh archaeological perspective on changes in social and political circumstances. They give us information on the confiscation and manipulation of a landscape. They tell us about human and animal mobility, and they inform us about economic connectivity in the context of Roman imperial ownership.
00:54:42
Speaker
not just as the material culture indicates with regions outside Italy, across the Adriatic and with North Africa, but also as the Dolia show with regions on the other side of Italy.
00:54:55
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Archeology Now. For more information about our podcast and guest speaker, please visit our page on the Archeology Podcast Network. You can get in touch with us at Archeology in the City on Facebook, WordPress, Instagram, or Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Next month, our talk will be about Marx from the University of Sheffield, speaking on experimental reconstruction of Roman bread. See you there.
00:55:26
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, in the Archaeology Podcast Network. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.