By Kate Rix

Old pots are yielding up new secrets, thanks to research by J. Theodore Peña, who joined Berkeley’s Department of Classics this year. Peña, an archaeologist specializing in ancient Rome, has pioneered a novel approach to understanding the ancient world through the analysis of pottery, which makes up 95 percent of what archaeologists find at Roman sites.

His 2007 book, Roman Pottery in the Archaeological Record, traces the entire life histories of Roman pots, from their manufacture as containers for wine or olive oil, to astonishing secondary uses as cement additive or even coffins.

“No one had thought systematically about how Roman pottery made its way through its life cycle,” says Peña. “I sought to draw on the full range of evidence — archaeological, textual and pictorial — to better understand the most abundant class of artifacts we have from the Roman world.”

Peña has made a recent study of transport amphorae — very large ceramic vessels used in ancient Rome to ship goods. Hundreds of varieties of these urns can be found throughout the territory once known as ancient Rome, all labeled according to where they came from and what they originally held. They are ideal for studying trade, food exchange and use patterns.

“We can sort them out and reconstruct how the wine supply in Rome changed,” Peña says. “One century Gaul was the biggest source. Then Asia Minor became important.”

Peña was attracted to Berkeley by its unique array of resources.  Seated in his new office in Dwinelle Hall, he singled out the extensive holdings of Etruscan and Roman pottery in the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, the vast collection of Roman-period papyri in the Bancroft Library’s Center for the Tebtunis Papyri, the analytical laboratories in the Archaeological Research Facility, and the interdisciplinary Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology, one of the nation’s premier graduate programs in classical archaeology.

He is particularly enthusiastic about the large number of faculty on campus whose research interests intersect with his own, including scholars and researchers in History, Italian Studies, Near Eastern Studies, History of Art, Anthropology, and Earth and Planetary Science.

In addition to his classroom teaching, Peña is planning a new field project that will engage students in examining artifacts from Pompeii. He anticipates that this work will provide significant research opportunities for Berkeley students, both on the ground in Italy and right here on campus.

“Pompeii is one of the very few sites where we can see the contexts in which artifacts were actually being used, rather than finding them in discard deposits,” he says. “That means Pompeii offers unparalleled opportunities for understanding the dynamics of material culture in the Roman world.”