Caričin Grad (Justiniana Prima) as a market: Searching for an Early Byzantine model of pottery production and consumption

Abstract

In order to reconstruct everyday life in the Byzantine city, archaeology gradually has shifted its focus from the analyses of objects and their spatial distribution to the wider study of political and socio- economic patterns. The past decades showed in particular significant advances in Late Roman archaeology, which thus became a sort of testing ground for various theoretical models addressing the organisation of different activities and the nature of socio-economic developments. The study of pottery production, distribution, and functional analyses has proved to be of huge importance for these models. In this respect, pottery consumption should be seen as resulting from the choices driven by many factors, including tradition, fashion, market demands, and social and cultural identities. Previous contextual analyses underlined the important role of production and distribution for the study of pottery consumption, and its theoretical and disciplinary developments drew from the research of urban centres, as was the case at Sagalassos in south-western Turkey. A number of major surveys conducted in other regions of the Mediterranean yielded material that persuasively testified to the processes of renewal during Early Byzantine times, i.e. the 6th and the early 7th centuries, including ceramic production trends and consumption patterns