9 - The Social Construction of Roman Industrial Space: The Limits of Chaînes Opératoires and the Nature of Roman Baking

Summary

Process-oriented approaches to understanding production in the Roman world, and the chaîneopératoire approach specifically, have become one of the mainstays of Mediterranean archaeology in recent years. Their application has revolutionized how we approach ancient crafts and workshops, but also how we make inferences about ancient life from the last vestiges of ancient built environments. Such approaches are not, however, without their limitations. The purpose of this paper is to review the history of the chaîne-opératoire approach with a view to how its application can be improved and where its limits lie. Process-oriented approaches have led to an undue focus on well-preserved archaeological sites and central Italy in particular, exacerbating a pre-existing tendency to leave little room for regional variation in our discipline. Moreover, theoretical models such as chaînes opératoires do not provide a diachronic framework through which one can draw historicizing conclusions, limiting the academic impact of their use. Finally, at least in the case of operational sequences, they have failed to incorporate industrial processes with social habits, as was their initial purpose, but perhaps if combined with other theoretical models we might begin addressing these obstacles.

INTRODUCTION

The study of Roman industries has advanced rapidly in the last ten years, from 2010 to 2020, by the deployment of a number of methods new to Mediterranean archaeology where Greco-Roman culture is concerned. The chaîne-opératoire (or operational-sequence) approach has emerged as one of the most widely influential methods to identify workshops and model production, and associate process with space. In such a framework production is cast as a series of interconnected processes that culminate in a final product. The method has revealed much about how pottery was made or how workshops operate. It has also allowed archaeologists and historians to move past dots on plans to better assess how production fits within the built environment of Roman cities. It formed only part of a general shift in how we reconstruct human activity in Roman cities, of which Hanna Stöger's work (2011) on Space Syntax and human movement through space formed part. Mediterranean archaeologists in the 1990s and early 2000s looked to be more critical about how to interpret space and reconstruct human activity in the urban landscape of ancient cities.