That podcast about the Viking combs in York got me thinking

I was listening to this archaeology podcast on my drive home last Tuesday and they mentioned finding over 400 bone combs at Coppergate in York. Apparently they were mass produced even back then, like 900 AD. It just hit me how much we assume ancient people were all handcrafting everything one at a time. Have any of you come across other examples of early mass production that surprised you?

3 comments

3 Comments

drew_hart46d ago

Yeah the Romans were doing that with pottery way earlier. There's this kiln site in Gaul where they found molds for literally thousands of identical lamps. Same design stamped over and over. And those clay figures they made in Britain, like the ones at Isurium, those were cranked out in molds too. It makes you realize mass production is way older than factories.

reese_hayes716d ago

That 3rd century Roman lamp mold factory outside of Lyon. They found like 2000 identical lamp fragments in one pit. Makes me think about the Roman military supply chain. They had these standardized bread stamps too. Same design stamped into loaves across multiple forts in Britain. One fort, Vindolanda, had a bread stamp with the same pattern as one found at a fort in Germany. Those guys were basically running a franchise system.

ryanm604d agoTop Commenter

Man I had the EXACT same assumption for years. I remember reading about that Roman bread stamp at Vindolanda and thinking, "That's just one fort doing its own thing." But finding the SAME stamp design in a fort all the way in Germany? That completely flipped my view. It's not like they were just reusing a common shape, it was the exact same pattern. So yeah, the Romans absolutely had some kind of supply contract system going. It's wild to think those soldiers were eating bread stamped from the same mold as guys hundreds of miles away. That's way more organized than I ever gave them credit for.