ABSTRACT
Archaeology exists by virtue of ‘things in history’: it relies on things being part of history, changing as human behaviour or historical processes changed. Without this prerequisite, it would be impossible to reconstruct history based on objects. This book has placed things not only in history; it has also showed them as history, as themselves shaping historical trajectories. Terra sigillata became defined as a homogeneous and bounded category in production practices at Lezoux during the 2nd century AD. As a result, it became easier to compare sigillata pots one against another, which opened up prospects for competition. Comparability and competition in turn put up rigid standards for reproduction, resulting in a centralized production landscape with few and fairly large production sites. As a category, sigillata was fully defined by a limited number of traits (calcareous clays, oxidizing firing, shiny slips, etc.). Any one of these traits could be forwarded to fit the requirements of different stages in the distribution sequence (on board a ship, in a warehouse, etc.), and of different contexts of consumption (ritual, domestic, etc.). Nevertheless, the other traits were always mutually implicated (e.g. calcareous clays came with oxidizing firing), so that the different stages of the distribution sequence were made to hang together, or the different consumption contexts shared a material homogeneity that preceded meaning.
