Classical archaeology is now in a well-advanced revolution. With time, this will upend age-old notions of the Greeks and Romans, as well as their myths. Writers ranging from Shakespeare to Nobel prize winners have taken their ancient bearings from the Classical authors. Generations of archaeologists have followed suit. Descriptions by a Cicero or a Pliny have shaped how Classical archaeologists have operated and interpreted ruins. Simply put, the archaeologist’s prime job was to pursue objectives defined initially by the German Enlightenment scholar Johann Winckelmann (1717-1768). Identifying artistic genres and artists lay at the heart of his thesis. Winckelmann was to cast a long shadow, as archaeologists excavated monuments for treasures in the belief that everything about ancient life was already known other than these marvels.
In the early 1970s, this all changed forever. Archaeologists everywhere began to appreciate that all manner of new information could be discovered about the past. Even the Greeks and Romans might be reinvented. Of all the great books on archaeology published in this period, up there with the most canonical is surely John Hayes’s Late Roman Pottery (1972). No one would claim this was a gripping read like, for example, the near contemporary – and no less groundbreaking – The World of Late Antiquity by Peter Brown. But Hayes’s book sent ripples around the Mediterranean and beyond. Now, thanks to Paul Reynolds, these ripples have become waves.
John Hayes had studied at Cambridge University and joined the Royal Ontario Museum as a curator in 1968, where – with support from John Ward Perkins, Director of the British School at Rome – he wrote his opus magnum. Why is this book so important? Simple, really: the typologies, dating, and sources of the most common types of traded fine wares on Mediterranean sites, from North Africa, the Levant, and Asia Minor, were sorted out after decades of confusion and, even more significant, these now provided a whole new dating framework for the archaeology of the 5th to 7th centuries. The world of the eastern Roman and early Byzantine Mediterranean also came into new focus, as Hayes had personally processed pottery from key excavations at Istanbul, Athens, Corinth, Chios, and Tocra inter alia. No less important, these type fossils enabled archaeologists to date and thus interpret plough-soil sites found in field surveys, such as John Ward Perkins’ celebrated South Etruria Survey in the rolling hills north of Rome.
