Trade and use of attic red-figure pottery in Ruvo di Puglia in the late 5th and early 4th centuries B C

Abstract

We would like to focus our attention on the imports of red-figure Attic pottery in Ruvo di Puglia, an indigenous site of Peucezia, in the last decade of the 5th and the begin­ning of the 4th century BC. If, in fact, it may be considered an established fact that there was a strong decrease in the export of figured Attic pottery from around 420 BC in all Magna Graecia and Sicily, an exception seems to be repre­sented by Ruvo di Puglia, where the quantity of imported pottery, in contrast, seems not only to increase in the last quarter of the 5th and, even more so, in the first quarter of the 4th century BC, but document a direct link between the Athenian Kerameikos (or at least the tradersmen) and the Peucetian city. The significant number of vases is an indication of the phenomenon, including the kantharoi (a special native peucetian shape) of the Class and Group Bonn 94A, the rhyta and the figure vases of different shapes of the W Class and Persian Class, the askoi and the several cups, almost all of the stemless type, which have not yet been compared in any other site of Magna Graecia, but also of Tyrrhenian Etruria and along the mid and high Adriatic coast. Our aim is to investigate the reasons for this trade trend and to explain the function of Attic im­ports in the reconstructed contexts.