Typology

Typology is neither snobbery nor stamp collecting. At its best it is a compression algorithm for human attention: you measure the same handles, neck angles, and toe curves across sites to ask which workshop habits traveled on ships. At its worst it becomes a shopping tag—“looks like a meiping”—without measuring wall thickness or reading the foot ring. We try to stay closer to the archaeological habit than the auction habit.

Dressel types and other transport-jar classes are useful precisely because they were designed to be boringly repeatable. The moment a typology becomes a fetish is the moment someone stops measuring and starts naming: resist that slide by keeping calipers and publication numbers in the same sentence.

Amphorae as the school of rigor

Transport jars reward typology because standardization was the point. Our Greek amphorae essay connects shape classes to resin, wine, and the arithmetic of volume. Pair that with Mediterranean & Black Sea for the corridor-level argument about wrecks and science.

When the sea rewrites the surface

Marine concretion can thicken a profile just enough to fool a quick silhouette trace. Typologists therefore work from cleaned sections under conservation supervision—not from aggressive scraping that erases the very diary researchers need.

When typology fails loudly

One-off court commissions, experimental studio pieces, and deliberate archaisms all break typological comfort. The honest move is to publish “uncertain” alongside measurements rather than forcing a famous noun onto an outlier. Cross-link to provenance when paperwork explains a weird silhouette better than a shape chart can.

Atlantic & studio worlds adds another wrinkle: catalog designers remix typologies for retail rhythm, so a “classical” krater profile might be millimeters off in ways that matter to archaeologists but not to window dressers.