The Dolia Defossa and viticulture at Vagnari

Abstract

At Vagnari, the fabric of the dolia defossa was distinctively different from that present in all the other ceramics from the site, as it was a distinctive orangey-red with black, glassy particles and reddish-brown grit fragments. The surviving lid fragment, on the other hand, is made of a fairly fine buff clay, suggesting it was made somewhere else. It is not unusual that dolia and lids might be made of different clays and in different workshops, as they are in Gallia Narbonensis, where some analysed lids were made in Rome, but the vessels were local. The recognition that it is important to conduct fabric analyses on dolia retrieved in archaeological excavations, whether on land or in the sea, is a fairly recent phenomenon. The vast majority of the gigantic transport dolia found in shipwrecks in the western Mediterranean that have been subjected to a fabric analysis are now known to originate in the Tyrrhenian coastal zone of western Italy, between southern Etruria and northern Campania. An invaluable opportunity presented itself at Vagnari, therefore, to conduct an archaeometric analysis of the clay to ascertain whether the dolia defossa were made at Vagnari or anywhere else in the region or if they were sourced from figlinae located further away. This research was carried out at the Universities of Palermo and Calabria.