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The Roman Pottery of Kent
by Dr Richard J. Pollard  -  Chapter 2  page 27
Doctoral thesis completed in 1982, published 1988


Fig. 10. Brockley Hill buff sandy ware: numbers of types

suggestive of a connection between distribution and the scale of production (as assumed to be reflected in the area covered by kilns) or the size of the ‘home’ market town. There are obvious flaws in this approach, notably the assumptions concerning the area of town or production: defended acreage does not necessarily equate with the overall area of a town, nor need intra-mural population densities be of the same order in all towns, while production units of a given size in terms of scale of production may be dispersed over areas of greatly different acreage for reasons such as availability of raw materials or density of local population and thus local demand. In the opinion of the

 present author, these weaknesses undermine the principle... to an unacceptable degree, and it was felt that the application of this approach would not be useful. Moreover, the dispersed nature of production of north-west Kent/southern Essex BB2 and grey sandy wares would make it difficult to justify the nomination of any one settlement as the ‘marketing centre’ (Rochester, Springhead and the possible ‘small town’ at Chadwell St. Mary may all have performed this function). The role of these wares is fundamental to any analysis of marketing patterns in Kent during most of the Roman period. It is possible that most

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