The Roman lead market: resources, organization, actors – FISTULAE
Fistulae. The Roman lead market: resources, organisation, actors
The FISTULAE project aims to provide information on the last stage of the production and commercial chain of the lead, a metal that was omnipresent in the Roman period, through the interdisciplinary study of an artefact that widespread in urban contexts, the hydraulic pipes (fistulae aquariae) sin the end of the Republican era. It creates the conditions for the development of a whole market for the lead that lacks a general and exhaustive survey.
The Roman lead market: a market to be discovered and characterised
The fistulae aquariae required large quantities of lead; they also contain a great deal of information (typological, epigraphic, geochemical) which, taken together, will provide answers to a series of questions concerning : - the origin of the metal used in the hydraulic networks of the urban edilitary programmes, an investigation that could be extended to peri-urban and rural sites, such as the large suburban or maritime villas of the Roman and provincial aristocracy. - the management of the resource and the organisation of supplies, which introduces to the crucial question of the practice of recycling over the long term. - the operation of the lead market on a large period, and the respective shares of the various production areas in supplying the market and its evolution, in order to identify any strategies put in place to ensure regular distribution of the metal. - the identity of the actors who drove the market and their respective roles in organising the market and managing the resource: the craftsmen, those who commissioned the fistulae, both private individuals and communities (cities), and even, in Rome, the emperors and the members of the imperial family and sometimes their entourage. The aim of the FISTULAE project is to set up systematic, large-scale research over a long period of time into various geographical areas that have been identified, on the basis of their potential in terms of material available for study, as major markets for lead produced in the Roman world: - in Gaul, on the one hand, the cities on the Mediterranean coast supplied by the ports of Narbonne (Narbo Martius) and Arles-Fos (Arelate-Fossae Marianae), and on the other hand, those in the middle Rhone valley, particularly Lyon and Vienne, linked to the port of Arles but probably also receiving lead from northern Europe ; - in Italy, on the one hand Rome and Ostia-Portus, the crossroads of the major Mediterranean trade routes, both from the West and the East; on the other hand the cities of Campania, supplied from Pozzuoli, Pompeii and Herculaneum; and finally the cities of Cisalpine Gaul, a market that was probably supplied primarily by the port of Aquileia, the gateway to the area for Mediterranean trade. All these major markets certainly had their own dynamics. But they will all be subject to the same reading grid, which concerns not only the type of pipes used, but also the identification of the various protagonists (craftsmen, clients) and the elemental and isotopic composition of the metal used. This will make it possible to compare these markets with one another, in order to gain an overall picture of how the lead market functioned in the western Mediterranean. This is the ambition of research that has never before been carried out on this scale.
The main thrusts of the FISTVLAE project are : - a systematic inventory of hydraulic pipes, based on bibliographical research and supplemented by fieldwork in museums and archaeological repositories; particular attention will be paid to contextualising the fistulae (particularly in terms of chronology): this work should also make it possible to identify homogeneous groups of pipes on the scale of a site or monument, according to predetermined criteria such as the number and size of the objects, the presence of traces of repair or restoration. Any inscriptions present will be systematically recorded: workshop marks, names of private or public sponsors (cities, Roman emperors), numerical inscriptions relating to the use of the pipes, etc. All these data will be fed into a Heurist database hosted on the Huma-Num platform, which is already operational and will be accessible to the entire research community at the end of the project. It will be linked to a Nakala database, which will contain at least part of the graphic documentation acquired during fieldwork (photos, inscriptions); it will also be accessible to all researchers. - the selection of those pipes that will be sampled in order to carry out two types of geochemical analysis: on the one hand, multi-element analysis to measure the homogeneity of the metal used and to eventually detect any mixtures or recycled metal: this will provide information on fistula manufacturing techniques, as well as on resource management (reuse, recycling, fresh metal, etc.). On the other hand, lead isotope analysis will be carried out on the same samples, with the main objective to trace the origin of the metal, by comparing them with existing datas on ores and, above all, on Roman lead ingots.
The aim of this project is to better understand the last stage of the production chain of a metal, lead, which was omnipresent in the Roman period, from the end of the Republic and under the Empire, that is, its marketing, its organisation, its logistics and its constraints, and the management of the resource. We propose here to work on one of the manufactured products that required large quantities of metal, the fistulae aquariae, or lead pipes that formed the water conveyance networks that Roman cities were equipped with. The latter provide information, both epigraphic (names of the craftsmen and/or clients) and geochemical (elemental and isotopic composition of the metal, which is that of the original ore), which, if duly analysed and cross-referenced, could provide information on the techniques used to manufacture the pipes, the origin of the metal used on them and, consequently, the sources of supply for the market, the evolution of the latter over time and the commercial strategies put in place. Epigraphy will allow us to better understand, thanks to the systematic inventory and the study of the names found on the pipes, the organisation of the lead market from the point of view of its actors, both private and public (emperors, cities), and the relationships they maintained between them. The project is therefore fundamentally interdisciplinary: it brings together researchers in history, archaeology and archaeometry around common problems. It will focus on several distinct geographical sectors, Rome and Ostia, Campania, Aquileia and Veneto, the middle Rhone valley and the cities of Mediterranean Gaul, which functioned as independent markets, but which should be compared in order to draw general conclusions about the global trade in Roman lead.
Project coordination
Christian Rico (Travaux de Recherches Archéologiques sur les Cultures, les Espaces et les Sociétés)
The author of this summary is the project coordinator, who is responsible for the content of this summary. The ANR declines any responsibility as for its contents.
Partnership
Direction des études - Antiquité Direction des études - Antiquité
ArAr ARCHEOLOGIE ET ARCHEOMETRIE
TRACES Travaux de Recherches Archéologiques sur les Cultures, les Espaces et les Sociétés
ASM Archéologie des sociétés méditerranéennes
Help of the ANR 400,648 euros
Beginning and duration of the scientific project:
January 2023
- 48 Months
