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Romano-British Face Pots and Head Pots*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2011

Gillian Braithwaite
Gillian Braithwaite
Affiliation:
7100, Glenbrook Road, Bethesda, Maryland 20814, USA
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Extract

Face pots and head pots which, while never common, were clearly much more widely used in Roman Britain than the number of surviving whole vessels might lead one to believe, are among the most attractive and least documented products of the Romano-British pottery industries. Face pots, with their crude, barbaric, rather comic-looking features stuck incongruously on a well-made Roman jar, are quite unlike any other type of Roman pottery, where free-hand figurative decoration is practically unknown. Head pots, with their contrived hair styles and naturalistic features, are more classical-looking and more acceptably ‘Roman’, and yet they seem to be a purely insular development, found only in the remote province of Britain and with no obvious close counterparts anywhere else in the Roman Empire except perhaps in North Africa. The purpose of this article is to outline the development of these two types of vessels in Britain and to make a preliminary attempt to define the regional groups that evolved, with a brief reference to the earlier and parallel developments on the Continent, and finally to discuss, in the light of the meagre evidence available, what might have been their function and possible significance.

Type
Articles
Information
Britannia , Volume 15 , November 1984 , pp. 99 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © Gillian Braithwaite 1984. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

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