Ivan González Tobar (Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3)
In this paper we present a review of the data and an analysis of gender in the artisanal society known through the epigraphy of stamps on olive oil amphoras from the Roman province of Baetica. The geographical zone studied is the territory of Corduba, capital of the province of Baetica, where more than twenty workshops have benefited from an important renewal of archeological data in last years.
First H. Dressel (1878) and then E. Rodriguez Almeida (1984) had detected an unusual presence of women among the names in the Genitive present on the tituli picti in position δ on Dressel 20 amphorae. These individuals have generally been interpreted as olive oil producers (Liou et al. 1990). What was the distribution of gender in the later economic stage, that of amphorae production? Can the many personal names inscribed on the known stamps on Dressel 20 provide more insights into the presence of women in Roman ceramic workshops? The new field survey carried out within the OLEASTRO program (ANR-11-LABX-0032-01) in the workshops of the conventus Cordubensis has made it possible to enlarge the corpus of potters now known. The corpus today comprises more than 300 potters. In the paper, we will try to distinguish the gender of as many individuals as possible from this corpus. This will make it possible to analyze the position that some women may have had within the hierarchy of the workshop, by comparing it with that which has been interpreted in other trades, such as lead pipe factories or textile workshops (Gourevitch and Raepsaet-Charlier 2001).
Finally, we present the case of one of the workshops (Isla de la Jurada, in Palma del Río), a site with complex epigraphy and exceptional stamps. If our assumptions are correct, it could have been made up of an especially large number of women, located at the top of its hierarchy.