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We had been expecting it, but the news – when it came – was a shock nevertheless to everyone, to me: John Hayes, the greatest of all the Classical Mediterranean pottery specialists, had left us. He was diagnosed with NPH brain disorder in 2016. Philip Kenrick and his wife Sue had generously taken on the responsibility of looking after him, keeping a watching eye, as the ailment got worse, until he agreed to move into a care home in Oxford, where he was well looked after.
Many of us, and I mean the Roman pottery community who knew him, will have stories and personal anecdotes. Easily recognisable with his bush of untrained hair – we once witnessed a wasp enter there and not easily emerge – he was eccentric in dress and speech, as well as having a good sense of humour.
He was born the same year as my mother, 1938, so I could always calculate his age. Those of Philip Kenrick’s generation were the first to collaborate with and learn from him as he developed his extraordinary career working from site to site in the Mediterranean, the Aegean, Turkey, the Levant, and North Africa. I was from the next generation, attending the Institute of Archaeology in London, like Paul Arthur and the late Simon Keay in the late 1970s. By this time, the book that changed Mediterranean archaeology forever – Late Roman Pottery (LRP) – had been several years published, since 1972.
Dating Late Antiquity
Submitted as John’s PhD thesis at Cambridge University in 1964, LRP was updated and finished in 1969. This was the culmination of a decade of research in the field, in libraries and museums, primarily in Athens and the eastern Mediterranean, drawing pottery type-pieces and making notes from excavation reports and journals. It had been the tradition for site directors to do their own pottery reports and typologies. John was the first major British pottery specialist who did not work in Britain or excavate, and turned to the Mediterranean and to the post-Classical world. In 1971, Peter Brown published another masterpiece The World of Late Antiquity, which outlined the multifaceted changes in culture across the Roman Empire and beyond from AD 150 to the Abbasids. John now provided a complementary, revolutionary new dating framework for archaeological sites in the Mediterranean through his typologies of the principal Roman tablewares found in contexts from the 1st century to the end of the 7th century, on sites from Britain to Dura-Europos, Leptis Magna to the Crimea. From 1930 to 1960, there had much debate as to even the origin of most of these wares, including African Red Slip (ARS) Ware. The focus of dating on coinage and on western Mediterranean sites by Lamboglia had led to an early end-date for ARS forms in particular. John’s knowledge of eastern Mediterranean as well as Tripolitanian sites with proven 6th- and 7th-century chronologies allowed the typologies and dating of these wares to be extended till the end of the 7th century. The archaeology of Late Antiquity could now be dated.
John’s writing style was always in impeccable English. He clearly describes his method of working, the evolution of African Red Slip Ware, the different fabrics and forms, listing and illustrating the type-pieces as well as their known distribution, set against their historical background.
The list of type-pieces and drawings in LRP and the later supplement allow us to track John’s pioneering work over the 1960s and ’70s, particularly in Greece, the Aegean as well as Tunisia and Cyrenaica, which led to further volumes with typologies on late Roman Tocra (1973), Hellenistic-Imperial Roman Paphos (1991), and the Church of St Polyeuktos at Saraçhane, Istanbul (1992). The latter is one of the most remarkable testimonies to the breadth of his knowledge, with typologies and selected stratified ceramic assemblages stretching from the 5th century to the end of the Ottoman period, providing in addition the foundation for a future, slowly developing interest in medieval and post-medieval archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean. It covered not only all classes of pottery but also glass. In the Paphos and Saraçhane publications he did not select the most ‘interesting’ vessels, or present the different classes of ceramics separately, as had often been the custom, but documented ceramic deposits and the entire range of finds in each, together with a typology.
As associate curator in the Greek and Roman Department of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, from 1968 to 1992, John had already shown the range of his skills in the catalogues he made of the collections. These included books on the Roman and pre-Roman glass (1975), Roman pottery (1976), Greek pottery (1981), lamps (1984), Greek and Italian black-gloss wares (1984), and even metalwork (1984). Meanwhile, during the 1970s, he been studying the 1st- to 7th-century deposits from the Canadian-Michigan excavations in Carthage that remain key documentation for Tunisian tablewares. There were also important studies of the Roman pottery of Knossos (1971), Corinth (1973), Troy (1997), Isthmia (1998, with the final volume on the site edited and published for him by Kathleen Slane in 2023), the Villa Dionysos (Knossos) (1983), Gravina (1994), Castel Porziano (Ostia, 2003/2009), as well as important late Roman deposits from Knossos (2001), Saranta Kolones (Paphos, 2003), and Kourion (2008). His final and long-awaited book was the Roman Pottery: Fine-Ware Imports, volume 32 of the Athenian Agora series (2008), the culmination of his decades of work on pottery from the American excavations.
In 1992, the Mediterranean pottery community – 20 years on from the publication of LRP – met in Rome to celebrate his pioneering work (published in 1995 as Ceramica in Italia – VI-VII secolo). Soon after this he published another bestseller, Handbook of Mediterranean Roman Pottery (1997), commissioned by the British Museum. An offshoot of that book, and one of the most impressive articles about Roman Mediterranean wares, is his presentation at the RCRF (1999) meeting in Ephesus, with its evocative title ‘From Rome to Beirut and beyond: Asia Minor and eastern Mediterranean trade connections’. This contains a host of drawings of all forms and classes of Roman pottery. It is amazing that his lovely, accurate, and detailed drawings were achieved 1:1 without a profile gauge, by eye, with a simple ruler and set square on white paper.
I first met him in Carthage in 1977, when I was 17. Quite in character, he was pulling out chunks of ARS covered in wet mud, dredged from Justinian’s harbour works, commenting ecstatically on the forms as he did so. We met again in Beirut, and then in Leptis Minor when he was studying the survey material. While talking to him on that visit, he suddenly excused himself and lay down full length on the floor right before me, with the words ‘I need to recharge’. He shut his eyes for about a minute, then sprang up and into action refreshed. Like many, I idolised him, but was careful not to show it: he hated any form of adulation. He liked to help budding pottery students: at conferences and especially in the ‘hands-on’ pottery displays usually laid out in the Fautores or LRCW conferences, he was mobbed like a pop star, with students capturing his presence on their mobile phones.
I learnt from him when we worked together for the only time (for three days in Butrint c.2002) that it is fine to not know something, to have doubts, frustrating though it is. I only went to see him once at his home in Oxford, bringing with me an American, Jennifer Coolidge, who was eager to meet him. It was touching how he received us with tea and cakes he had bought for the occasion. This was my only glimpse of the inner sanctum: there were huge piles of books and papers occupying much of the living room. That did not surprise me, of course. More recently, I was working in the Corinth stores and I cannot overstate the thrill of discovering African Red Slip Ware vessels that he had drawn for LRP… had touched! I felt close to the one and only pot god. My debt to him, though, is incomplete, as I promised to bring to publication his 1990s report on the excavations in Beirut. Now John Hayes’ original drawings are with me, by my desk, waiting for me to assemble the text and illustrations and demonstrate his brilliant work one more time.
