Wooden instrumentum and the structure of its production in the civitas Treverorum (1st C. BC., 4th C. AD.)
Through processing waste, tool marks and specialization markers
My doctoral research project aims to study and identify small wooden objects from the Roman period, collectively referred to as instrumentum, originating primarily from the territory of the civitas Treverorum (southern Belgium, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the area of Trier, and northern Lorraine in France).
Over the past twenty years, the discovery of numerous Gallo-Roman waterlogged contexts by preventive archaeology, such as wells, latrines, and basins, within the civitas Treverorum has led to the remarkable preservation of a wide variety of wooden artifacts, many of which remain largely unpublished. This corpus will complement some localized studies in northern Gaul and allow for the revision of numerous typologies of objects based on examples from Herculaneum or Pompeii.
In addition to the functional identification of the instrumentum, my doctoral research proposes a holistic approach to the study of wood, encompassing not only finished objects, but also manufacturing waste, offcuts, and raw wood materials. This approach also involves identifying the types of wood used and tracing their supply chains, whether local or imported, such as in the case of boxwood (in collaboration with the project led by F. Blondel, dedicated to the inventory and study of boxwood uses in Gaul).
The application of three analytical tools—traceology (the study of tool marks), the identification of manufacturing waste, and the recognition of specialization markers—will enable an assessment and categorization of the techniques employed, the products created, and the organization of woodworking activities in situ for each context studied. Furthermore, the research aims to go beyond the concept of workshops to explore domestic woodworking activities within rural roman villae and to develop the hypothesis of a woodworking craft exhibiting varying degrees of specialization in the vicii, as well as heightened specialization in the capital of the civitas Treverorum, Trier.
The diversity of contexts and their comparison at the scale of the civitas will support the thesis of a structured woodworking craft in the civitas Treverorum. This structure reflects the organization of woodworking activities based on differentiations, hierarchies, and complementarities within the civitas and integrated into more complex networks for raw material supply and production distribution.