The corpus of stamps on Italic Terra Sigillata from Tindari. An update and some notes

Abstract

For a long time, the site of Tindari, an important city on the northern coast of Sicily that has been the subject of investigation since the 1950s, has seen scholars focus more on defining the urban structure and analysing the city's monumental findings, reserving less space for aspects of the centre's material culture in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The recent resumption of investigations has given new impetus to the studies, offering an opportunity to deepen our knowledge in this regard. The present paper focuses on the attestations of stamps on Italic Terra Sigillata pottery, starting from an unpublished nucleus of finds from the revision of the materials from the Lamboglia 1950-1952 excavations and from the more recent investigations carried out by the University of Turin in the Cercadenari district, analysed in relation to the already known attestations: the census of the identified potters, almost all of whom are still unknown in the Tindaritan panorama, opens the way to interesting considerations on the variety of production attested, on the city's main supply channels, on the commercial circuits in which it was involved and above all on the possibility of its insertion into a Mediterranean network, evaluating the role of Tindari within the broader framework of the conspicuous imports of Italic terra sigillata to Sicily between the late Republican age and the early Imperial period.