Over Land and Sea: the long-distance trade, distribution and consumption of ancient Greek pottery

REVIEW BY ROBIN OSBORNE Trade in Greek pottery long attracted little interest. Finley’s massively influential The Ancient Economy (1973) discouraged both the idea that archaeological data might have anything to add to study of the ancient economy and the idea that pottery was economically significant. However, the scale of pottery production is clearly such that the low value of individual items does not stand in the way of pottery as a whole being economically important, and pottery is arguably the single item most informative about the exchange of goods in antiquity. This is because the functions and the geographical origins of many pots can be identified with a high level of reliabi