The persons who produced, distributed, and used Roman pottery engaged in various actions that determined how, when, where, why, and in what condition and quantity pottery came to be incorporated into the archaeological record. It seems a reasonable assumption that, from the time of its manufacture through to the time of its incorporation into the archaeological record, a substantial portion of Roman pottery was subjected to these actions in a more or less regularly recurring order that may be thought of as constituting a sequence akin in certain regards to the life cycle of an organism. In consideration of this observation, this study employs as its organizing basis a general model of the life cycle of Roman pottery. This construct is of value in that it not only helps identify the various actions that governed the formation of the pottery record, here termed behavioral practices, but also elucidates the ways in which these worked individually and in concert with one another to do so. This chapter presents this model, discussing its conceptual basis, describing its general organization, defining its individual components, and considering its limitations.

To construct a model of the life cycle of Roman pottery, this study takes the general model of the artifact life cycle – a conceptual scheme formulated by Schiffer in the early 1970s (Schiffer 1972: 157–60) that went on to gain wide acceptance in Americanist archaeology – and modifies this to take into account the specific set of circumstances relevant to Roman pottery.