244 CHAvDAR TzOCHEv
None of the other excavated Thasian workshops, however, confirmed the
case of Kalonero; quite the opposite, the Keramidi workshop yielded a large
number of fabricants’ names over a short period of time, some of them even
attested with the same annual official (Garlan 1999a: 51). Indeed, it is the exis-
tence of multiple fabricants per year in a single production site that under-
mines the theory of the fabricant as a workshop owner. This phenomenon
appears too often to be considered an exception, and can be observed in dif-
ferent workshops. In most cases when there are multiple fabricants per year at
a given site, one of the fabricants is represented with many stamps, while the
rest count a few handles. Hence, the dominating fabricant has been considered
local, and the stamps with other fabricants have been explained as imports
from elsewhere, intrusions resulting from consumption at the place of produc-
tion (Garlan 1986a: 263; Garlan 2004 –5: 284, 304). Some of these ‘intrusive’
fabricants clearly belong to other workshops, where their stamps are attested in
great numbers, but there are also controversial cases in which the same stamp
is well presented in two workshops, or multiple fabricants are well attested in
a single workshop during the term of the same official (Garlan 1986a: 264).
These could be explained with a change of the fabricant as head of the work-
shop in the course of the year (Garlan 2004 –5: 284). A better solution is to
suppose that the fabricants were not workshop owners, or at least not in all
cases. The ‘intrusive’ stamps indicate that fabricants changed workshops and/or
several fabricants operated simultaneously in one workshop during the term
of a single official.^12
The fabricant-κεραμάρχης could therefore be considered a person responsi-
ble for a single production group, be it as a manager, supervisor, or master-potter.
In such case, several production groups could have shared the same workshop
(or specific facilities at the same production site) or moved from workshop
to workshop as lessees. One way to reconcile the contradictory evidence is
to assume that not all workshops were organized in the same way: that some
of them formed parts of wine production estates, while others were leased to
independent entrepreneurs (Garlan 1999a: 382). The case of the Arretine sigil-
lata industry presented by Fülle ( 1997 ) provides an idea of how such various
types of production groups might have coexisted.
Let us now return to the methodology of estimating production dynamics.
The number of production groups (fabricants) attested with a given annual
official reflects the amount of labor engaged in amphora production for that
year. Thus, the change of this number over time will reflect the dynamics of
production – roughly, not strictly, since the size of the production groups var-
ied, and some potters were more productive than others. Still, a change in the
number of fabricants should reflect a higher/lower demand for containers,
corresponding to changing crop expectations. If this change is not restricted