Red slip pottery and Late Roman Tanais in the light of new research
Red slip pottery and Late Roman Tanais in the light of new research

Author(s): Krzysztof Domżalski
Subject(s): Archaeology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Tanais; red slip pottery; Late Antiquity
Summary/Abstract: Red slip vessels found in Tanais are a very numerous category of imports, which arrived by the sea to the Late Antique settlement founded on the forgotten ruins of an Early Roman tradesmen town, destroyed around the mid-3rd century AD. Previous research allowed to determine that the later settlement was established about a century after the destruction caused by the Goths, and existed for several decades keeping regular contacts with the Bosporan and other Black Sea coastal centres. The paper updates the knowledge about the Late Roman red slip ware finds almost twenty years after the publication of the basic study on the discussed category of imports in Tanais. The source materials are mainly the finds from the Polish-Russian excavations in Sector XXV, conducted in 1999–2019. Altogether 32 fragments of Late Roman red slip vessels were found there. The vast majority (29 fragments) were the finds of the Pontic Red Slip ware, coming probably from the north-eastern part of Anatolia. These supplies were supplemented by the much more modest imports from the Northern Africa (African Red Slip ware, 2 fragments) and eastern Aegean (Late Roman C/Phocean Red Slip ware,1 fragment). The typo-chronological analysis of these and earlier finds, as well as some results of new studies, especially on the Pontic Red Slip ware vessels, indicate that the Late Roman settlement in Tanais was founded slightly later that it was assumed, at the very end of the 4th century and that it had regular contacts overseas until at least the end of the third quarter of the 5th century.

• Details
• Contents