Abstract/Summary

In this paper, we expose the discard of Athenian black-figured pottery from the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE. We refer to these small containers, produced in the thousands for Athenian festivals, as ‘festival ware’. Curators are aware of such vessels, mostly unprovenanced, often fragmentary, which mass in museum storerooms. We discuss festival ware in the Athenian Agora as case studies in refuse management and frame our research within modern environmental concerns and posthumanism. With our focus on object itineraries that are affected also by natural agents, such as soils, rocks, and groundwater, we draw parallels between ancient practices of deposition, modern refuse management, and the stacking of pots and fragments in museum storage. For both ancient and modern audiences, nature is not an ideal(ized) open space but rather a deposit that, like museum storerooms, preserves used and broken artefacts.