CoFIPoMS is a two-year research project (2020-2022) on pottery from the early Roman period in Malta and local pottery raw materials. It is hosted by the Department of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Malta, under the supervision of Dr Ing. John C. Betts and Dr Maxine Anastasi. The project currently employs one Researcher, Ms Emma Richard-Trémeau but also involves other specialists, technical staff, and students from other departments at the University of Malta and abroad. The petrographic analysis was performed by Dr Claudio Capelli who has been collaborating with the Department of Classics and Archaeology on several projects.
The main aim of the project is to enhance the understanding of the production of local pottery during the Late Punic/Early Roman period in Malta. The project has two approaches:
The CoFIPoMS project promotes interdisciplinary research, and is at the crossroads of many disciplines including archaeological science, material culture studies (particularly pottery studies), experimental archaeology, petrography, materials engineering, chemistry and data analysis. The breadth of the project, therefore, requires the involvement and consultation of specialists in a variety of fields.
This project follows on from the Marie-funded MaltaPot project, which focused on pottery from the pre-Temple Neolithic phases in the Maltese Islands. The raw material studies will complement the work that had previously been carried out on Maltese clays. The methodologies developed as part of the CoFIPoMS project owe a lot to the trials, successes and setbacks of this earlier project led at the University of Malta.
CoFIPoMS is funded by a University of Malta Research Excellence Fund.
Last year, partnering up with Savio College, four sessions were given by the CoFIPoMS team on pottery studies and raw material studies to secondary school students of the college studying archaeology.
Presentations on the project were delivered by the main researcher (E. Richard-Trémeau) of the project. These were:
Further use of project deliverables in teaching included providing pottery-study related material for the study unit ARC2040: Scientific Applications in Archaeology on fabric studies.
CoFIPoMS appears on the October 2022 edition, Issue 39, of the Think Magazine and the main researcher has participated to the THINK soapbox on the 14th of October 2022.
Other public talks include:
A talk, "Pottery fabrics from Malta: characterising Late Punic/Early Roman fabrics from the Żejtun Villa and the sanctuary at Tas-Silġ.", highlighting the preliminary results of the analysis performed by stereomicroscopy and polarised light microscopy, was presented at UKAS 2022 in April 2022.