Systems of Knowledge and Strategic Planning in Ancient Industries

Egyptians produced funerary stelae as part of their mortuary assemblages for more than three millennia. This practice continued during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods (ca. fourth century BCE to fourth century CE) even as the region’s population diversified. While individuals retained certain elements as defining features of this corpus, such as the representation of the deceased and standard offering formulae, other material, stylistic, and textual elements were inherently customizable (Wells 2014).

Recent scholarship on Roman painting tends to agree that painting workshops were flexible in their membership—that is, workshops were formed for a particular project, after which the workers were free to form new groupings for different projects. Although individual workers might participate in many such workshops over the course of their careers, they still managed to produce paintings that were internally consistent in terms of style and composition.

In the study of ancient ceramic production, the analysis of organic remains emerging from kiln contexts has long provided a crucial link between firing practices and the consumable materials that fuel the process. Through environmental, flotation, and charcoal analysis, researchers can identify the source of organic remains used in firings.

We know that apprenticeship existed in the ancient world, but our window into its scope and nature is limited largely to contracts discovered in Egypt. Moreover, the majority of those contracts concern the textile industry and come from the private library of a single family. But for most industries, we only infer their existence from the products they made or the material consequences of the services they offered, such as lead menders on dolia or homogeneity in the construction of masonry ovens.

The spread of drama in the Greek world in the late 5th and 4th centuries BCE led to the creation of groups of professional, traveling actors. As early as 279-278 BCE, they began to form regional professional associations, calling themselves the Technitai of Dionysus. These actors' associations, which remained active into the 3rd century CE, secured rights and privileges for their members through frequent correspondence with festival organizers, civic authorities, and imperial administration.

Previous scholarship on Roman craft production has centered on the socio-cultural and economic implications of these industries’ activities and output, shining light on the lives of ancient tradespeople and expanding exponentially our understanding of craft processes. The layout and construction of workshops, however, has seen limited study outside scattered examinations of chaînes opératoires. This focus has obscured not only the physicality and novelty of their production contexts, but also the knowledge required to set up these facilities.