L'instrumentum fittile inscriptum Latinum: proposta per una schedatura informatizzata a partire dalla documentazione modenese

Over the past few decades an intense discussion has taken place among scholars about the important role that instrumentum inscriptum plays in the reconstruction of various aspects of Roman social and economic history. One of the key issues is the definition of the criteria for publication and computer cataloguing of this class of materials, which includes various types of objects (amphorae, lamps, fine ware pottery, building materials, etc.) and inscriptions (stamps, tituli picti, graffiti ante or post cocturam). This paper presents a proposal for cataloguing fictile instrumentum inscriptum through a relational database which takes into account both the archaeological and epigraphical aspects of this kind of documents, also paying particular attention to possible prosopographic comparisons with lapidary epigraphy. The collection of these data allows the user to pursue socio-economic research on the basis of different criteria, which can be variously combined: geographical, typological, prosopographical and chronological. Three case studies show the usefulness of this tool both for analytical and statistical studies.