Scholars have many ways, both traditional and experimental, to approximate the scale of craft production, which has always been central to the stury of ancient economies. This panel examines these new methods, some borrowed from other disciplines, for estimating the workshop crew size, the workshop physical space, the time requirements for the chaîne opératoire for each product, the needs of the population for different goods, or the percentage of ancient products surviving to this day. Even Cook's (1959) seminal 1% of ancient ceramics modern survival percentage based on the survival rate of Panathenaic amphorae is now considered an overestimation. These new methods and approaches should help us overcome the paucity of archaeological evidence. By employing social network analysis, individual worker's output, architectural energetics, and production-consumption ratios, we aim to improve our understanding of the scale of craft production. in the ancient Greek world, both in Greek mainland and in Greek colonies in Sicily. Archaeologists and ancient economists are using new approaches to study the ancient economy at a micro-level, taking into consideration several variables, such as raw material procurement, labor investment, cross-craft dependencies, apprenticeship periods, and product demand, to name a few. Our test cases range chronologically from Prehistoric to Classical times, and geographically from Athens, to the Argolid, and Selinunte in Italy. The industries covered are pottery-making, vase-painting, tile works, and monumental construction. This panel will show how the labor investment for tiling a roof or for building a monumental tomb in Bronze Age Greece reveals the economic complexity of ancient societies in craft specialization and workforce mobilization. Moreover, estimating the sizes of ancient ceramic workshops can lead to better reconstruction of the economic cycles of production and consumption, which helps us understand the range of scales of imports and exports. Our discussant, Peter Acton, a distinguished economist, has studied several industries in Classical Athens. With his micro-level focus he has demonstrated how some industries have a competitive advantage over others, either by specialization, or increased personnel, or a branded name.

1.  Kyle Jazwa (Duke University)

Comparing the Labor Investment and Production of Early and Late Bronze Age Ceramic Roofing Tiles in Mainland Greece
In this paper, I evaluate the economics of ceramic roofing tiles in Early and Late Bronze Ages (EBA; LBA) Greece. On two separate occasions, ceramic roofing tiles were “invented,” used for centuries, and subsequently forgotten. The tiles were not adopted from foreign sources and, in both instances, roofed several central structures. Despite this, tiles were not labor saving or functionally superior relative to their vernacular counterparts, but required a significant increase in labor investment. Roofing tiles, therefore, offered an important visual impact to the structures they covered. Despite these similarities between periods, a close examination of the physical remnants of productions demonstrates that there were unique technologies and labor requirements for each period’s tiles. With an evaluation of the assemblages from Zygouries, Mitrou, Eleon, and Lerna and the published accounts of the tiles from Gla, Kolonna, Tiryns, and Midea, I reconstruct the labor requirements for tile production in each period. I then consider these results relative to the local/regional ceramics industries and assess the broader economic impact of tile-roofed structures in each period. I show that roofing tile production in each period was distinct. Whereas LBA tiles required substantially more resources, specialized labor, and integration into the broader economics of ceramics at the time, the demands for EBA tiles could have been met by the household with ad hoc and unskilled production.

2.  Rodney Fitzsimons (Trent University)

Laying the Foundations for the Mycenaean State: Labour Investment, Tomb Construction, and Early State Formation in the Bronze Age Argolid
Prior to the appearance of the first palaces at Mycenae in the 15th century B.C., the most impressive architectural manifestation of elite authority in the Argolid was not the palace or the house, but rather the tomb, specifically the shaft grave and the tholos tomb. While the funerary data supplied by these burials have long served as the primary means by which the study of Early Mycenaean state formation has been approached, such studies focus almost exclusively on the grave goods themselves, rather than the tombs that housed them. This paper seeks to address this lacuna by applying an energetics approach to the funerary landscape, an approach that posits that the quantity of labour expended upon any particular architectural project correlates with the socio-political complexity of the society that produced it. Since one aspect of socio-political power is defined by differential access to labour resources, the values thus generated serve as quantifiable and easily comparable measures of the power of those groups responsible for their undertaking. This approach injects a new, yet rarely considered dimension to current discussions of “wealth” and “status” and offers new insight into the nature of the socio-political transformations that transpired during the Early Mycenaean Period.

3.  Giulia Rocco (Università di Roma Tor Vergata)

Relations among Workshops and Craftsmen in Protoattic Vase-painting: Limits and Perspectives in Quantifying the Production
The pottery production of Athenian workshops in the VII cent. B.C., raises many questions, sometimes similar to those risen by their later activity in VI cent. B.C., when the amount of painters/potters and vases produced was considerably higher also for export purposes. In this paper will be examined the limits and perspectives in quantifying the production of a ware made mainly for ritual purposes, the individual worker’s output and the organization of the workshops, that seems more instable than before and later. The major problem in protoattic vase-painting is in fact represented by the difficulty to recognize the transfer of skills and knowledge from an artisan to another and, as result, the reconstruction of the activities of the single craftsmen within a workshop. There are also examples of painters moving from a workshop to another, but also going abroad, in a period in which migration played an important role in the staff turnover and in transferring the style of some protoattic workshops within the territory of Greece and in the West. The workshops of the Vulture and Passas Painters, of the Analatos and Mesogheia Painters and of the Painter of the Cinosarges Amphora offer starting points to examine some of these issues and a comparison term to focus on some transformations in the 2nd and 3rd quarter of the VII century B.C., that may be the consequence of a different historical and social context in which craftsmen worked.

4. Eleni Hasaki (University of Arizona) / Diane Harris Cline (George Washington University) / Tyler Jo Smith (University of Virginia) / Najee Olya (University of Virginia) / Ethan Gruber (University of Virginia) / Peter Stewart and Thomas Mannack (Oxford University)

Beazley's Connoisseurship-based Athenian Kerameikoi: A Social-Network Analysis
Our paper focuses on the Social Network Analysis (SNA) of the collaborations between Athenian potters and painters of 600-400 BCE as established by Sir John D. Beazley in the first half of the twentieth century. Beazley identified more than 1,000 potters and painters for over 20,000 black-figured and red-figured vases. His attributions have remained largely unchallenged and central to the study of stylistic analysis of these pots.
The visual rendering of these associations will highlight who were the true innovators of the Athenian Kerameikos, and how the entire quarter was interrelated. It will also help us identify some weak associations where the workshops simply satisfied the local demand without amounting to great catalysts of technology and style.
Beazley’s connoisseurship-based attributions have received a lot of criticism because Beazley did not state clearly his methodology and used several terms (also without defining them) to associate painters and potters with each other. The complexity and ingenuity of Beazley's work will be visually displayed, showing that he, despite the criticisms of his work, was in some sense a forerunner of Social Network Analysis. Our project will be the first one to actually visualize, calculate, and evaluate the total amount of all these associations and interconnections, moving beyond simple lists of painters and potters and encouraging scholars to discern previously-unnoticed patterns.

5.  Philip Sapirstein (University of Nebraska–Lincoln)

Productivity and Staffing of Athenian Pottery Workshops from a Quantitative Perspective
This paper builds upon my recent work on the Athenian pottery industry (AJA 117.4: 493-510 [2013]), which demonstrated that the number of vases attributed to a painter corresponds to career length, and whether the painter was a full-time specialist or also potted. The research reveals a significant shift toward specialization after the development of the red-figure technique. My new paper will consider the broader question of workshop staff. An ethnographic model approximates the numbers of individuals that would have been required in the full production sequence. Because it is likely that the painting of the vases occupied a significant fraction of the whole time needed to complete a pot, we can model the personnel of an Athenian workshop according to its total number of associated vases.

I focus on workshops whose corpus is reasonably well defined. Those of Exekias and Nikosthenes are representative of the latter sixth century, when one master potter and painted most vases with only minimal staff support. By the fifth century BC, red-figure workshops like those of Brygos and the Penthesilea Painter must have been substantially larger than their predecessors. However, in the big picture the Athenian workshops remained relatively small, and the evidence for expansion by vertical integration within shops is limited. The early Classical Athenian industry did not develop large manufactories like those attested in regions producing Roman sigillata.

6.  Vladimir Stissi (University of Amsterdam)

Millions of Vases can’t be wrong. But how about making them? Assessing the Scale of Archaic-Classical Athenian Pottery Production and Its Impact on Workshop Staff
In several recent papers, I have argued that the scale of production of Athenian Black and Red Figure pottery was much larger than is usually assumed. The amount of extant material, the excavated production remains and their spread over the Athenian periphery, the evidence derived from Beazleyan attribution, and estimates of likely consumption rates, even in Athens alone, all seem to point in a similar direction – a seven-figure yearly output for the Late Archaic and much of the Classical periods. While – roughly -- calculating such high estimates, and offering supporting evidence for them, is, in my opinion, not very hard, the part that still largely eludes us regards the way production at such a scale was organized, and what its implications were on a human level. Detailed studies of both excavated workshop remains and attributed vases have offered us indications of labour division and hierarchies within workshops, and there has also been some discussion about numbers of craftspeople involved in various tasks and hierarchical roles. In this paper I want to explore a bit further what large scale production may have meant for the work and lives of the artisans doing the work, to see whether it is possible to offer a general impression of the ways the output was made possible. This will not only help us to understand the achievements of those involved, but is also, I think, a necessary condition to make any estimate of the scale of production realistic and credible.

7.  Martin Bentz (University of Bonn)

Production and Consumption of Ceramics at Selinous. A quantitative approach
For the first time a real “potter’s quarter” with at least 84 kilns of cassical time has been identified in Selinous. On this base it seems possible to determine plausible production numbers comparing them to consumption numbers in order to find out if ceramics were produced for subsistence or if a surplus was created. Moreover the number of people living on ceramic production is compared to the number of all inhabitants to understand the role of ceramic production for the city’s economy.

8.  Niccolò Cecconi (Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene)

The Economy of the Ancient Pavements. Prices, Contracts and Economy of the Mosaics and Marble Floors in the Ancient Greek World
The proposed paper aims to discuss some archaeological and epigraphical documents related to the prices, contracts and economy of the mosaics and marble floors of the ancient greek world.
The analysis will focus in particular on financial operations relating of marble floors and mosaics registered: in the building accounts of the greek temples and sanctuaries of the classical and hellenistic age (Rationes aedificationum); in the papiri of Zenon Archive; in others significants epigraphic documents.
The research will analyze three main aspects of the documentations:
1) The prices of materials for the production of marble floors and mosaics.
2) The payments of craftsmen involved in the construction of marble floors and mosaics.
3) The relationships between craftsmen and buyers involved in the construction of marble floors and mosaics.
The informations inferred from research, likened with the archaeological data, could provide a first frame of the economic, financial and productive processes of the floors of the ancient greek world.