Lusitanian Amphorae in Adriatic Italy: Commercial Routes and Distribution

This paper proposes the review of the framework of the circulation of the Lusitanian transport amphorae in the Adriatic, on the basis of a bibliographical overview and a fiew unpublished materials. The analysis of the evidence, in any case very scarce, has chanced upon some problems, due to incorrect or superficial identifications, as well as to the objective difficulty of distinguishing Lusitanian products from Baetican ones. The whole framework takes advantage of the detailed analyses of the regiones Venetia and Aemilia and, despite the quoted limits, allows some general considerations to be drawn on the Lusitanian imports, which are much less than Baetican ones. In any case, the imports of fish sauce from the Iberian Peninsula were restrained by the development of local products. The small increase in the late Empire seems to be due to the presence of Lusitanian and/or Baetican Almagro 50, 51-b, 51c amphorae on the commercial routes of North-African foodstuffs. Furthermore, this paper clarifies the distribution in the same geographical area of the S. Lorenzo 7 amphora, probably coming from the eastern Mediterranean, which shows morphological details in the upper part very similar to Almagro 50 ones, with which it has been often confused.