TRANSPORT AMPHORAS AND MARKET PRACTICES 263
supply and demand process of price creation. Of course, some products
will be more suited to storage than others, but amphoras at least create the
possibility. Amphoras, as storage containers, allow producers and merchants
some degree of choice in when and where to enter the market (if they
choose to exercise this choice). For producers, this means greater flexibility
in ensuring that household needs are met before dispersing any surplus. For
both the merchant and the producer this storage function contributes to
giving these economic actors the status of wants traders rather than needs
traders (Prasch 1995 ). It also means that no single producer needs to have
a large amount of surplus to enter into the market process. This possibility
creates an important bridge between householding economies and market
economies.
Of course, amphoras, are not the only means of storage – they coexist withpithoi or other permanent storage facilities as the main vessels for household
storage. Despite their shared function, they bring very different features to the
economic possibilities of the household. A house with a stockpile of goods in
amphoras has a quantifiable stock of goods in manageable units. If the house-
hold realizes there is a surplus at some point in the year, that portion of the
stock is easily transferred to the market. On the other hand, with pithoi any
surplus will have to be decanted to amphoras for export from the house-
hold. The amphora-stocked house in the archaeological record seems better
suited to intermittent entry into the market system, while the pithos-stocked
house more likely either simply receives and consumes goods or, in the case
of a large-scale operation, consistently plans to store and then decant and
distribute large quantities. For example, Nicholas Cahill ( 2002 ) found quite
varied distributions of pithoi and amphoras at Olynthus with a clear distinc-
tion between houses in the ‘Villa section’ with large scale storerooms well
equipped with pithoi as opposed to houses in the North Hill region more
often with only one small pithos (transport/storage amphoras were not con-
sistently recorded). Bradley Ault ( 2005 ), at Halieis, reported traces of at least
fifty to seventy amphoras and two to three pithoi in most houses he studied.
Excavations at New Halos (Haagsma 2010a) found three to eleven amphoras
per house as compared with one to three pithoi. House 6 at New Halos with its
relatively smaller size, yet larger numbers of amphoras (11) and loom weights
(137, as contrasted with 13–34 in the other houses) seems more ‘market ori-
ented’, both in agricultural goods and textiles, than the others. An interesting
twist to such numbers would be to consider the potential impact of the nature
of the abandonment, the cyclical nature of households’ needs for dispersal of
surplus, and so forth. This is, I admit, a tentative idea, but it might repay the
more thorough assembly of some comparative statistics and consideration of
which houses at which sites, rural and urban, depend more on pithoi and which
depend more on amphoras.