long, even sealed, and consumers want it fresh, so there are no dates on
Dressel 20 amphorae. Wine is different. Consular years were occasionally
painted on containers used for fine wine that might be laid down. The
prefiring stamps and graffiti on amphorae offered different kinds of guar-
antee. Many related to the management of the production processes by
which these vessels were made. The study of ceramic production is
making clearer and clearer how often potters working individually came
together to share facilities like kilns.^35 Control marks on brick, tiles, and
amphorae were often designed to enable different producers to keep
separate products that were visually hard to distinguish. This reflects an
increasing tendency to standardize size and appearance of products—to
the extent that when petrographic analysis was first employed on wine
amphorae it revealed completely unsuspected diversities of provenance
among vessels classified typologically as identical. None of this uniformity
was the product of mechanized or automated processes, and there can
have been few practical advantages, the main exception being in helping
stack and store large consignments. The development of Italian wine
amphora types in the Western empire shows a concern by Italian produc-
ers to duplicate the physical appearance of the vessels in which more
prestigious Greek wines—like those of Cos—were imported, followed by
a concern by provincial producers to replicate styles that had become
associated with central Italian production. I emphasize two points. First,
amphora makers tried increasingly hard to conform on canonical types.
Second, writing was a vital means of allowing distinction among these
products, and a guarantee of the quantities and qualities that this uni-
formity claimed.
All this is so natural to us—living in a world of standardized sizes and
obsessive commodity labeling—that it takes an effort to step back and see
how remarkable and unusual it was in antiquity. Much exchange took
place directly between maker and consumer, or through a single inter-
mediary, even in classical times. The history of labels on container am-
phorae can easily be traced back to the Bronze Age. But before the
Hellenistic period they rarely did more than specify contents or owner-
ship. The more complex systems seem to have originated chronologically
in the late third or early second centuryB.C.E.
It istempting toconnect this with somecontemporaneous developments
in the Mediterranean economy. These might include the appearance of
thevilla; the creation ofmacella—retail food markets in Rome and its
colonies; the development of the Roman law of agency that made it possible
to regulate institores; the boom of public contracts noted by Polybius,
exemplified in censorial building projects and by the provisioning of
Roman armies overseas; and by the apparent mushrooming in the trade of
- Pucci 1981, Fu ̈lle 1997 on Arretine, Peacock 1982, 114 28 in general.
58 Situating Literacies