Ulteriori informazioni
Mons Claudianus is the site of a major Roman quarry complex, situated in
the Eastern Desert of Egypt. The quarries, which were operated as an imperial
monopoly, produced a fine grey granodiorite which was used largely in prestige
imperial building projects in Rome. Once abandoned by Rome, the settlement lay largely
untouched, and in a superb state of preservation, until the advent of tourism on the Red
Sea coast in the 1980s. Seven seasons of work conducted between 1987 and 1993, produced
a detailed survey of the large quarry field and fortified settlement area, and excavations
undertaken to elucidate the functioning and chronology of the site. Among the major aims
was the construction of dated sequences for various classes of ceramic artefact, something
that had been sadly lacking for the earlier centuries of the Roman period in Egypt but which
is made possible at Mons Claudianus by the association of the ceramic materials with dated
ostraca.
The high status of the site is reflected in the range of materials represented. This report
provides a comprehensive account of the Egyptian and imported pottery and faience vessels,
vessel stoppers, ceramic lamps and small objects. The report on the vessels includes a detailed
description of fabric and forms, together with a dated catalogue. Quantified groups, ranging
from the mid-first through the early third century AD, chart the ceramic trends through time,
and are used to address broader issues, such as supply and demand, at the site. The report
on the pottery lamps includes a comprehensive catalogue, and presents a new dated typology
designed to be flexible enough to accommodate future discoveries, as well as fabric analysis
designed to establish provenance. A typological analysis of 273 vessel stoppers with their
inscriptions attempts to correlate stopper type with vessel contents, and from this draw broader
conclusions about food supply to Mons Claudianus. Finally, the group of terracotta and plaster
objects, though relatively small in number and fragmentary in condition, forms one of very
few well-dated collections of these materials published from Graeco-Roman Egypt.
