METRU.MENECE: An Etruscan painted inscription on a mid-5th-century BC red-figure cup from Populonia

Pottery is so ubiquitous among the material we have surviving from later periods that it is easy to think that ancient people occupied a world which was as stuffed with broken sherds as the layers we excavate; and ceramics seem especially important when they are as handsome and archaeologically informative as classical vases. Starting with a single sherd from Populonia, David Gill takes a different view of pottery, and its commercial transport, in the classical Mediterranean.