Contents (click title to go straight there)
   Secretary's News
   Website URL
   Conference 2008
      Booking Form
   The Graham Webster Memorial Grants for attending the Annual Conference
   The John Gillam Prize
   SGRP 2008 Elections
   John Hurst Travel Fund
   Conference Round up
   Late Roman coarsewares . . . in the Mediterranean
   Food and Drink 2008: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
   An Introduction to recent developments in open access and the on-line dissemination of information
   Interesting Websites
   Names on Terra Sigillata (Samian Ware) - pre-publication offer

Secretary's News
Welcome to the April Newsletter. This issue is mainly taken up with information about the Group’s annual conference in Cambridge in July. However there are some notes about recent conferences I have attended, and a useful website that I have come across in my travels. I am also pleased to include a commissioned article about some of the issues relating to on-line publication so that we are all kept up to date with recent developments. As ever members are welcome to provide information about potentially useful internet tools

Website
Due to circumstances beyond our control, we have now had to change to a new URL for the Group's website. Please note that the new URL or website address is sgrp.org.uk

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Study Group for Roman Pottery (SGRP) Conference
Cambridge   Fri 4th - Sun 6th July 2008

The SGRP 2008 conference will take place on the weekend of July Fri 4th - Sun 6th in Cambridge. We will be staying at Clare College, a university hall of residence only 15 minutes walk from the McDonald Institute where we will hold the lectures. Both venues are within the centre of historic Cambridge. The conference will run from 2.30 pm on the Friday to 1pm on the Sunday.

   The speakers represent the diverse nature of professional archaeology today and will present their recent research covering both within East Anglia and Europe. There will be a mixture of spoken papers, posters, handling and viewing sessions and a field trip. This year we are very keen to have a good display of posters for the conference. If you would like to present your research using this format please contact Gwladys or Alice for guidelines and advice (see below for email).

   The Friday night dinner will be a formal event within the beautiful Great Hall of Clare College, while Saturday’s evening meal will be in the relaxed atmosphere of the Castle Pub in Cambridge.
   On Saturday the coach trip will first go to Car Dyke where Stephen Macaulay will give us a tour, we will then travel to Saffron Walden to visit the Museum. It will be followed by a guided tour of the Bartlow Hills barrow cemetery with Sarah Poppy.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

All talks are 20 minutes long, with five minutes for questions

Friday 4th July, Start of conference at the McDonald Institute
Chair: Roberta Tomber (SGRP President)
   14.30 - 14.35: Welcome
   14.35 - 15.00: Geoffrey Dannell (freelance): Roman potteries around Durobrivae
   15.00 - 15.25: Mark Hinman (CAM ARC): The Topography of Roman Cambridgeshire
   15.25 - 15.50: Grahame Appleby and Christopher Evans (CAU) Roman Fen-Edge Production 
                              and Supply Dynamics: Excavations at Earith & Somersham, 1996-2007
   15.50 - 18.00: Tea followed by pottery and galleries viewing at the Archaeology and Anthropology Museum
                              accompanied by Anne Taylor. The pottery viewing will take place in small, guided groups.
   18.00: Transfer back to Clare College (bar open)
   19.30: Dinner in Great Hall

Saturday 5th July
     8.00: Breakfast.
     8.45: Transfer to McDonald
Chair: Rob Perrin
     9.00 - 9.05: Introduction
     9.05 - 9.30: Steve Macaulay (CAM ARC): Car Dyke
     9.30 - 9.55: Jerry Evans (Freelance): Horningsea
     9.55 - 10.20: Alice Lyons (CAM ARC): Early coarse wares in the Cambridgeshire region
   10.20 - 10.45: Val Rigby (Freelance). Early Roman fine wares
   10.45 - 11.15: Tea
   11.15 - 11.40: Pot stop - Several short papers
   11.40 - 12.40: AGM
   12.40 - 13.00: Transfer to Clare College
   13.00: Lunch
   14.00: Coach leaves for trip to Car Dyke (Steve Macaulay), Saffron Walden Museum (tea break and 
                                 tour of museum) and then to Bartlow Hills Barrow Cemetery (Sarah Poppy)
   19.00: Return to Cambridge
   19.30: Dinner at local pub (The Castle)

Sunday 6th July
     8.00: Breakfast.
     8.45: Transfer to McDonald
Chair: Jerry Evans
     9.00 - 9.05: Introduction
     9.05 - 9.30: Katie Anderson (CAU): Pottery Earith - the Camp Ground assemblage, funtion, trade and deposition
     9.30 - 10.00: Andrew Peachy (AS): Pottery production & work-place rituals on an industrial site at East Winch,
                                in the Nar Valley, Norfolk". 
   10.00 - 10.25: James Gerrard (PCA). Pottery from the Walbrook Project, London
   10.25 - 10.50: Pot stop - Several short papers
   10.50 - 11.20: Tea
Chair: tbc
   11.25 - 11.50: Gwladys Monteil (Nottingham University): Felix Oswald Samian Project Update
   11.50 - 12.15: Robin P Symonds (Institut National de Recherches et d’Archéologie Préventive): Poppy beakers
                                 in Alsace. Some points of interest in ceramics research in eastern and north-central France.
   12.15 - 12.40: Louise Rayner (ASE) Town & Country in Roman Essex: dealing with archives and assemblages 
                                 from Eastern England
   12.40 - 13.00: Rachael Seager Smith and Kayt Brown (Wessex Archaeology)Recent Research on a large 
                                 pottery assemblage from Springhead (Kent)
   13.00: Questions/close of conference

Booking Form at the end of Newsletter

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The Graham Webster Memorial Grants for attending the Annual Conference
In commemoration of the substantial contributions to Roman pottery of one of our founder members, Graham Webster, a conference bursary is available to those who would otherwise be unable to attend.
   The SGRP Committee invites those of limited means to apply for a grant towards the conference fee and travel. A total of £300 will be made available and will be awarded to applicants based on demonstrated need and relevance. The maximum amount available to any single applicant will be one-half of the conference cost and one-half of the travel expenses. The refund will be made at the conference in Cambridge.
   Applications may be submitted by members and non-members of the Group. Preference may be given to applicants wishing to attend most or all of the conference. A sub-committee of the President and Treasurer, who will seek advice as relevant, will consider the applications with discretion. Applications should be made via a brief statement verifying the limited means of the applicant and their wish to attend the conference. Applications may be submitted by email or letter to the Hon. Secretary (Phil Mills, 28, Park Road, Anstey, Leicester, LE7 7AX E-mail: ). The closing date for applications is the 19th of May 2008. Applicants will be informed of the decision within a week of submission.

The John Gillam Prize
The annual John Gillam Prize, established in 2004, honours a founder of our Group, for his tremendous contribution to the subject. Nominations are now being accepted for the 2008 award. A wide range of work on Romano-British pottery is eligible, including pottery reports (both published and grey literature), synthetic studies, student dissertations, theses etc that were completed within the last two years. Please send your nominations to the Group’s Secretary, Phil Mills, at  ,who will forward them to a sub-committee consisting of the President and other co-opted members with backgrounds appropriate to the nominations. Nominations are open until the 1 June and the winner will be announced at our annual Conference in Cambridge, between the 4th and 6th of July 2008. The award carries a small financial prize.

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SGRP 2008 Elections
There are no vacancies on the Committee for ordinary members this year. Of the officers, Louise Rayner has completed three years as Membership Secretary/Treasurer. She is happy to stand again, unless of course someone else is interested in the post. If you would like to be nominated, please contact Phil as soon as possible by email 
( ).

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John Hurst Travel Fund - Medieval Pottery Research Group
Because of the delay in getting this edition out, the deadline for this year has already passed. However I thought members would still be interested and I will post a reminder next year. PM.
   This fund was established in 2007 to honour the enormous contribution made by John Hurst to the study of medieval and post-medieval pottery in Britain and Europe. It offers a number of travel grants of up to £200 each to members of the Medieval Pottery Research Group who need financial support to carry out their research. Grants are awarded annually and the closing date for applications is the 23rd of March each year. Applicants will be notified of decisions by the 16th May of the same year. Preference will be given to applicants whose projects help strengthen links between Britain and the rest of Europe and to students or those at the beginning of their careers.
   Successful applicants will receive the grant before they travel if required and must provide receipts to cover the amount within one month of their return. They must provide a summary report of no more than 250 words to the Hon Editor within 3 months of the research project being undertaken, and must agree to cite the MPRG John Hurst Travel Fund in any publications resulting from the funded project. An application form can be found on the Group's website www.medievalpottery.org.uk

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Conference Round up - Phil Mills
The Institute of Field Archaeologists Annual Conference
This was held this year at the University of Swansea from the 18th to 20th April. It was attended by around 400 delegates who had the opportunity to explore the local archaeological landscape, as well attend some 14 sessions over 2½ days. Session topics ranged broadly with the opening plenary session on the ‘Future of the IFA’, covering responses to the new Heritage protection bill. Of particular interest to members, I hope, was the session organised by myself, as Chair of the IFA Finds Group on ‘ Progressing professional Practice’, and by Jane Evans on ‘Artefacts, Geomatics and Landscapes.’ The geomatics session had examples of a number of case studies on the use of ‘the new media’ and especially the use of GIS. As ever the point was well made that modern technology is never a substitute for a research question.
   ‘Progressing professional Practice’ was the ‘official’ Finds group session of the conference and papers started with Nick Cooper on ‘The role of universities in finds training’, followed by an international perspective offered by Dr Ulla Rajala on Finds training in Finland and Italy, Cei Paynton and Mark Lodwick presented a paper on the outreach work of the Portable Antiquities Scheme. They made the important point that there is a lot of interest in finds amongst the general public, which is not reflected in the archaeological profession as a whole.
   Duncan Brown outlined the reception of the ‘Guide to Best Practice for Archaeological Archives’, recently produced by the Archaeological Archives Forum http://www.britarch.ac.uk/archives/Archives_Best_Practice.pdf . This is a very useful document to quote when persuading commercial units that "yes they should be washing and marking pottery!"
   Dr Amanda Forster outlined some of the problems of comparing finds reports produced in the PPG16 environment. Phil Mills presented highlights of the results of a survey into Professional Practice carried out over the previous six months, And Nicky Powell ended the session with an outline of the IFA Finds Groups training days and hands on-sessions.

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Late Roman Coarsewares, Cooking wares and Amphorae in the Mediterranean LRCW3
This is the third in an international series concentrating on Late Roman coarse wares, and amphora. It has previously been held in Barcelona and Aix-en-Provence, proceedings of both conferences have been published by BAR. This year the conference was held in Italy and split between Parma and Pisa. I was only able to go to the Parma based section, on the Eastern Mediterranean. Each day started at 8.30 and running to 7.30 in the evening – this made for very long days.
   Unfortunately the large number of papers did not allow for much time for discussion, and there were no social events for this stage of the conference, further cutting down on the opportunity for cross pollination of ideas. I personally think that a conference of this size would have been better run as concurrent sessions, to encourage more discussions. Reducing the number of papers given would have helped, especially given the wide range in quality of the papers (I know that I was not the only one struck by one paper which did not cover the Mediterranean, the late Roman period or coarsewares, indeed barely mentioning pottery at all!). I also don’t think a spoken paper is the best format to present a new typology. The point was made a number of times that the use of scientific analysis in the subject should be addressing archaeological questions, rather than using new techniques on archaeological material. This was sadly reflected in some discussions on ‘thermal shock’ which looked at the properties of specific paste recipes with no modelling of the contents of cooking pots. 
   There was also an attempt to redefine ‘diet’ in an extremely reductive sense, apparently based on the results produced by lipid analysis, without taking into consideration any of the complicated social dimension.
   Fortunately there were a number of important papers, including on a production site for LRA1 in Cilicia, Turkey, by A Ferrazzoli and M. Ricci, a comparison between the material from Butrint and Beirut given by Paul Reynolds, and an update on some coarse wares from Athens given by John Hayes. There was also a very good poster session, arranged geographically so during the poster sessions we had access to groups of people working in the same region.

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Food and Drink 2008: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
April 11^th and 12^th 2008 University of Nottingham
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/archaeology/research/conf_fooddrink.php

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An Introduction to recent developments in open access and the on-line dissemination of information
Alun Salt
The American government recently signed into law a requirement that publicly funded science research should be made available via open-access publication. Various journals are adopting the policy of allowing authors to self-archive papers they have written (green open access) and the number of open journals (gold open access) is increasing. A list can be found via the Directory of Open Access Journals at http://www.doaj.org/ There is currently debate over whether or not journals should be moving to an open-access model. The answers are not certain.
   A series of discussion papers were recently published in Scholarly Journals between the Past and the Future (edited by Martin Rundkvist). Jan Hagerlid has argued that the increasing might of the major publishers will squeeze out independent journals as publications get bundled into subscription packs. Jesper Laursen of the Jutland Archaeological Society in contrast sees a journal as being tightly bound to its society and performing a services for its members, especially Kuml the journal of the JAS which publishes in Danish. Zbigniew Kobylinski took another view, saying that open access (and English publication) was essential if a minority interest, in his case Polish archaeology, was to gain a wider audience. There are plenty of other chapters in the book, but all are founded on the idea that Open Access and commercial publications are opposite poles. While working over some material I’ve found this is not necessarily the case.
   Another option may be available via ‘print-on-demand’ technology. There are several companies now offering what is essentially the 21st century incarnation of vanity publishing, but some companies such as Lulu.com may be offering something which could prove useful to a scholarly publication. Lulu can offer free storage and distribution of PDF files, but it can also offer print sales for a low set-up fee which can (currently) be purchased via outlets like Amazon UK/USA. The catch is that, like a few publishers the material has to be uploaded in a publication-ready format.
   Using the site is relatively simple. You can download a template as a Word document for the size of book you wish to produce. This could be anything from a 6" by 9" mass-market paperback to an A4 sized journal of record. You choose an appropriate binding, saddle stitch, coil-bound, perfect-bound paperback or casebound according to page length and personal preference. You save the completed file either as a .doc or .pdf file. You then produce a cover for your book and upload. After this you set a price for your publication and the book is ready to be ordered.
   For the most basic options a publisher could choose to take no royalties and sell only via the Lulu website. In this case the publication cost is zero pounds. The cost to buy the PDF is also nothing. The print publication would cost £2.50 plus 1.3p per page. A 200 page A4 book would cost £2:50 + 1.3p x 200 = £5:10. This compares well with photocopy charges. Things get more complicated if the publisher takes a royalty. The manufacturing cost stays the same, but whatever royalty is set by the publisher, an extra 25% is added as Lulu’s cut. So if someone were to make a pound profit from each book sold then the actual price would be £5:10 + £1:25 £6:35. The download PDF would cost £1:25
   The value of this is that it enables a flexible approach to publications. These prices assume that the journal is sold through the Lulu marketplace. People who may be happy parting with their credit card details at Amazon may think twice before doing the same with Lulu. Lulu offers a method of publishing allowing people to purchase through commercial book-sellers like Amazon, but these are profit-making companies and they greatly increase the costs and purchase price.
   First you have to buy the ‘Published by You’ distribution from Lulu. This costs £70 for 10 ISBNs and there may be an admin fee of around £20 for each publication published after the first. The manufacturing cost is as before, but this time whatever the cost is after the royalties have been added to the manufacturing price, this cost is doubled for the purchaser. The £5:10 zero-royalties option now costs £10:20 per volume to the reader. The society may be able to purchase author-copies at the manufacturing-only price, but this would shift P&P costs onto the society. A £15 volume would only have to sell 10 copies to break even with the Lulu charges, but this does not count the time spent by editors preparing a volume. Again the value of the support from the current publisher should be taken into account.
   However internal publishing could enable the society to pursue a more flexible approach to licensing. The bulk of sales for material is usually within the first three years, but the use of an academic publication can be many times that. A possibility exists of a staggered publication policy releasing publications onto the web after a set period has passed. Other alternatives would be to make the work available via Creative Commons licence as a PDF, as well as print, but require that authors are members of the society before they can publish to finance the journal. If the society has a code of ethics or practice then this would show that publication within the journal is a privilege.
   It may be there is no compelling need to change the status-quo, but this would appear to be a time of potentially great change due the technological and economic pressures.

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Interesting websites
Phil Mills
I would like to thank Jay Pont for the link to this web site. Members may be interested to note the existence of a free image analysis suite, written in Java script, called ImageJ and available for free download from http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/index.html
   I have only had a limited time to experiment with it, and have been using fabric images, rather than thin sections, but it is potentially a very useful tool for those like me who are interested in fabric characterisation. I would be interested to hear the results of anyone’s experiments with this software.

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Please remember to keep your contact details up to date, including any new e-mail addresses.

Membership Secretary & Treasurer: Louise Rayner
   Flat 2, 121 Church Road, Teddington, Middlesex TW11 8QH.
   Email: louise@lourayner.freeserve.co.uk

Hon. Secretary SGRP:   Phil Mills
   28, Park Road, Anstey, Leicester, LE7 7AX
   E-mail:

Back to Newsletters                 Back to SGRP Homepage

The Group would welcome comments upon its WebPages and any information that may be useful to Group members and those interested in aspects of pottery of the Roman period. Please send details too 

Booking Form for SGRP Conference 2008
Clare College, Cambridge University, Cambridge Friday 4th July to Sunday 6th July 2008

Please note that as this is a campus-based conference the deadline for residential bookings is Friday 30th May 2008. The deadline for non-residential booking is Monday 16th June.

   Bedrooms in Clare College will be available from 2.00pm on Friday and need to be vacated on Sunday by 9.30am. A luggage room will be available in Clare College before 2.00pm on Friday.
There is limited parking at Clare College. These spaces need to be booked in advance and will be allocated on a first come first serve basis.

   The fully inclusive price for the conference in a standard room is £175 (with a twin occupancy reduction of £10 per person). This includes conference fee, Friday night dinner (with wine), accommodation and breakfast for two nights, refreshments on all days, lunch on Saturday, a coach trip and a pub meal on Saturday.  If you would prefer en suite accommodation the fully inclusive price is £225.

   The daily rate for the conference is £23 to cover the conference fee and refreshments, £30 on Saturday to also include the coach trip. Lunch on Saturday will be an additional £9 and the conference dinner on Saturday £12.

   If you need additional details please email gwladys.monteil@nottingham.ac.uk 
or Alice Lyons alice.lyons1@ntlworld.com

Please complete the form below and send to

   Gwladys Monteil, 21 Wilberforce Road, Wisbech PE13 2EX

Study Group Roman Pottery Conference 2008

  Cheques should be made payable to SGRP. Please ask for a receipt if you require one.

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Names on Terra Sigillata

Pre-publication offer open until 1 June 2008

Names on Terra Sigillata, the product of 40 years of study, records over 5,000 names and some 300,000 stamps and signatures on Terra Sigillata (samian ware) manufactured in the first to the third centuries AD in Gaul, the German provinces, and Britain.

This is the first catalogue of its type to appear since Felix Oswald’s Index of Potters’ Stamps on Terra Sigillata ("Samian Ware"), published in 1931. The importance of samian as a tool for dating archaeological contexts and the vast increase in samian finds since then has prompted the authors to record the work of the potters in greater detail, illustrating, whenever possible, each individual stamp or signature which the potter used, and enumerating examples of each vessel type on which it appears, together with details of find-spots, repositories and museum accession-numbers or excavators’ site-codes. Dating of the potters’ activity is supported, as far as possible, by a discussion of the evidence. This is based on the occurrence of material in historically-dated contexts or on its association with other stamps or signatures dated by this method.

The bulk of the material was examined personally by the authors, from kiln-sites and occupation-sites in France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Britain, but the catalogue also includes published records which they were able to verify, both from those areas and from other parts of the Roman Empire.

Order from: Publications Department, Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study,
   University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, WC1E 7HU, UK

Email:  icls.publication@sas.ac.uk           Tel no. +(0)20 78 62 87 05           FAX: +(0)20 78 62 87 22