The Quantity of Antiquity

Prompted by a passage in Maurizio Bettini's 2023 Chi ha paura dei Greci e dei Romani? Dialogo e cancel culture (my broader thoughts on which I reserve for another time and place), I wanted to put down a few thoughts on the amount of stuff that survives from the ancient world, at least in an impressionistic manner. Ideally I'd like to put together something more rigorous (that means something has numbers...), but perfect is the enemy of the done.

Bettini's work is measured and dialectic and ill reduces to quotation of an isolated passage; just a phrase, then, will have to do here, the more so since his larger point is of no concern here. He refers to la pesantezza, chiamiamola pure cosalità (p. 84; "the weightiness, we could even call it the thingness") of the accumulated mass of texts, structures, artifacts, and traces that remain from  the Greco-Roman past. (In all of this I have the impression of retracing things put better by others previously.)

How much of ancient Mediterranean antiquity "survives" until the present day? There are different classes of material, clearly. The literary texts that we know, overwhelmingly via a continuous manuscript tradition, are many, though relatively few compared with what we know once existed, thanks to citations of titles in surviving texts, for example. This number is unlikely to ever change by any significant number, even if the work being done on the eponymous materials from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum is very promising.

Material culture, that is artifacts, that is stuff--bones, stones, and, overwhelmingly, broken pieces of pottery, among others--is another story. Here again what "survives" is probably a very small percentage of what once existed. The metric that is always rattling around in my brain is the Panathenaic 1%, which was, as far as I know, first put together by Martin Bentz (but I would be happy to be corrected). In short, Panathenaic amphoras were produced for the victors of the Panathenaic games at Athens. Because we know the frequency of the games etc., we know in theory how many Panathenaic amphoras should have been produced in antiquity. If we compare this with the number of such amphoras known archaeologically, we get a figure of about 1%. Of course, this is a different kind of 1% than with literary texts. This number could change (and is changing) as a consequence of ongoing archaeological excavation. But it at least gives us an order of magnitude for the proportion of a particular class of ancient ceramics that are presently known and knowable to Science. 

(What about the other 99%? While it is often said that ceramics break but are otherwise almost indestructible, and there is some truth to this, this is not the whole story. While the Romans were great offenders, in that the socio-economics of empire led to the production of immense quantities of ceramics, these same dynamics also contributed to the spread (not the invention—that pre-dates the Roman use) of waterproof pavements made using ground-up potsherds—the usual name for such pavements is the Italian cocciopesto, which literally means "ground-up potsherds"—the production of which must have pulverized unquantifiable* tons of pottery, sparing future ceramicists from having to catalog them. Of course, a lot of this terracotta dust probably also came from bricks or rooftiles, whose destruction is less generally mourned [sorry, Phil].
* anything and everything is quantifiable if you're willing to fudge a bit. Actually, Vitruvius in Book 7 gives recipes for various kinds of pavements, one for instance calling for three parts of potsherd to one part lime. The problem would be to calculate how much ceramic material all the many such pavements consumed...)

So, only one percent! A discipline founded upon loss. At the same time, many archaeological storerooms have reached critical mass. The sheer number of artifacts deriving from excavations (or, to a much lesser degree, surface finds, whether stray or due to regular archaeological survey) is immense, and strains the resources of already underfunded museums and archaeological superintendencies. I don't think those outside of archaeology (nor many within it, especially those coming from, say, North American backgrounds) really appreciate just how much stuff there is. (This is where a bit of numbers, which is to say rigor, would be helpful.) More studies of materials from depositi would be ideal (of course, meanwhile, there's an "overproduction" of PhDs relative to the declining number of positions available in academia.)

(Some excavations have turned to a form of catch-and-release, where the materials are given a rapid study, and those from which little further information can be gleaned, due to their nature, state of preservation, or context of origin, are quietly and secretly disposed of, or simply used as backfill for excavation trenches.)

I have more to say but this turns out to already have gone on a bit long.