Wandering Pots, Wandering Pictures

Despite its conventional classification as a prestige object or an acculturation marker, figured ware is a valuable tool for understanding the relationships between communities in cross-cultural contexts. My project took the sites of Pisticci and Metaponto in Southern Italy as case studies to explore the dynamics related to the consumption of figured ware between Greeks and Italics. Attic and Southern Italian figured pottery have been considered as a whole, covering a long time-span (mainly between the last quarter of the sixth to the fourth century BCE) overtaking the separations known in literature. Eventually, vessel-shapes and iconographies show marked differences between the two sites, but the myth could reflect their interaction. Moreover, the examination of the inner structure of the composition and its contextualisation give insights on the role figured ware could have had into funerary contexts, while the analysis of imports and local figured products rebalances the organisation of the market.