Late Hellenistic Pottery in Athens: A New Deposit and Further Thoughts on the Association of Pottery and Societal Change

Abstract

In addition to presenting an Attic ceramic deposit of the Late Hellenistic period, the author connects the increase of imported pottery and local imitations in assemblages of the late 2nd and early 1st centuries B.C. with contemporary changes in Athenian society. During this period the emerging political elite ofAthens developed strong commercial interests and foreign contacts that may have led to changes in dining practices (e.g., the introduction of foreign metal shapes). Emulation of these cosmopolitan practices may have encouraged importation of foreign pottery-presumably skeuomorphs of metal vessels-and provided the impetus for Attic ceramic imitation of imported metalware. The aim of the present paper is twofold: to contribute to the study of Attic pottery in the Late Hellenistic period by adding one more deposit to the rather small published corpus from this period and, most importantly, to view Attic Hellenistic pottery in its wider historical context. I am particularly concerned with the significance of pottery as an indicator of social and economic change in Late Hellenistic Athens.1 A LATE HELLENISTIC DEPOSIT FROM THE SOUTH SLOPE OF THE ACROPOLIS