Contextualizing the operational sequence: Pompeian bakeries as a case-study
Résumé
One way of approaching the interpretation of workshops can be to investigate whether they have been designed specifically or not to accommodate the activity that took place within them. Hence it is of a primary importance to appreciate the different tools involved in the workplace in order to reconstruct the operational sequence and see if its organization is rationalized or not.
While bakeries do belong, almost since the beginning of the excavations, to Pompeii’s public image, earlier studies have always portrayed them as random assemblages of mostly three types of equipment: mills, kneading-machines and ovens. Reviewing the 35 known bakeries in Pompeii – some of them no more in use in 79 A.D. – allows rediscovering all existing equipment, some of which having never been taken into account, in their functional context and characterizing their spatial relations. If the reconstructed operational sequence shows three work-clusters – grinding, loaf leavening and baking –, there are two specific context-types that might be distinguished from the others: some bakeries are lacking mills, but no independent mill has been recognized yet in the city. These reflections on the operational sequence, re-inserted in the Pompeian context, might lead to a better understanding of key socio-economical processes in the first century A.D.
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