Hudson Adds to Historic Narrative Through Roman Pottery

It’s been a long, slow and careful process excavating artifacts from the Agora of Athens, the ancient public square and birthplace of democracy that’s been the subject of study for generations.

Nicholas Hudson, professor of art history, has been a regular at the Agora as a specialist in Roman pottery — a small sample of the historic period and manner of artifacts unearthed there. Far less flashy than older Athenian pottery, the pieces nonetheless help frame the lifestyle of Athenians during the Roman Empire.

Hudson has traveled to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for three summers as a pottery specialist at the one of the last unexcavated sites in the Agora, plus the entire month of February spent working on legacy data.  

“That ultimately allowed me to string together a sequence of pottery, the skeletal structure of typology from the first century B.C. to the sixth century A.D.,” he said.

While there’s been extensive research documentation of archaeological analyses at the Agora, Hudson’s niche of Roman pottery hasn’t been a focal point. But his focus on the common mugs and jugs for drinking and serving wine has manifested into a manuscript submitted to Hesparia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

The trend toward hot wine service beginning in the second century A.D. led Hudson to suspect it was the result of a cooling period referred to as the Late Antique Little Ice Age, aligning with other historic and archaeological indicators found around the Mediterranean.

Hudson said he has more work ahead of him in building out the typology of Roman pottery and that “the biggest project is yet to come.”