Dr Philip Bes

On Zones and Borders. Regional Patterning of African Red Slip Ware and Late Roman C in Central and Southern Greece and the Aegean

Various categories of Late Roman Red Slip Wares – mostly African Red Slip Ware (ARSW), Late Roman C (LRC) and Late Roman D (LRD) – reached numerous places in the Mediterranean and Pontic areas. It has long been established that the distribution of these categories is characterised by geographical, chronological, and quantitative patterning, patterns which were shaped by proximity to production places/zones, geography as well as exchange routes and mechanisms, amongst others.

The Ancient Cities of Boeotia Project has collected a mass of ceramic artefacts between 1978 and 2011 through intensive and extensive surface survey. While part of this is still being (re)studied for publication, various interesting examples of intraregional patterning have been observed, one notable being that of African Red Slip Ware and Late Roman C. Whilst both categories are present in all ancient cities (e.g. Tanagra, Thespiae) and a number of smaller and rural settlements that were investigated by the Boeotia Project, distinct differences exist across Boeotia. Despite the lack of stratigraphic control, these differences are regarded as representative, also as they appear to match patterns beyond Boeotia. This paper will present the Boeotian evidence for ARSW and LRC and underline the main elements of intraregional patterning. Placing these data in a larger geographical framework that encompasses Central and Southern Greece as well as (parts of) the Aegean sheds further light on distinct geographic and quantitative variations. Subsequently, this allows to address questions and matters of (economic) interconnectivity, zones of interaction and local/regional social, economic, and artisanal contexts.

Philip Bes studied Classical Archaeology at Leiden University (1998-2003), followed by doctoral and postdoctoral research at the University of Leuven (2004-2009). From 2010 until 2021 he worked as a freelance researcher for Roman pottery, and from December 2021 until November 2023 he was a senior postdoctoral researcher at the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Vienna with a 2-year project entitled “Pottery and Transformation in Roman and Byzantine Limyra”. A research proposal aimed at mapping archaeological and archaeometrical evidence for the manufacture and distribution of Late Roman C was recently submitted to the Austrian Science Fund. He was/is researcher/staff member for a number of excavation and survey projects in Greece (e.g. Boeotia, Megara), Turkey (e.g. Sagalassos, Limyra, Ephesos, Pitane, Kinet Höyük) and Israel (e.g. Caesarea Maritima). His general research interests include the typological, chronological and provenance identification of Late Hellenistic to Early Byzantine pottery, while one of various more specific topics being the distribution of Black Sea amphorae in the Eastern Mediterranean, topics on which he regularly presents and publishes.