NAPLES, ITALY—According to a report in Discovery News, Marco Giglio, Giovanni Borriello, and Stefano Iavarone of the University of Naples “L’Orientale” may have found a factory in the city of Cumae where cookware mentioned in the first-century Roman cookbook De Re Coquinaria was made. Known as “Cumanae testae,” or “Cumanae patellae,” the pans, made in the city of Cumae, were said to be the best for making chicken stews. “We found a dump site filled with internal red-slip cookware fragments. The dump was used by a pottery factory. This shows for the first time the ‘Cumanae patellae’ were indeed produced in this city,” Giglio said. More than 50,000 fragments of high-quality lids, pots, and pans with the non-stick red coating were found in the first-century dump. “All the defective artifacts were dumped here. These pieces help us enormously to reconstruct the way the pottery was manufactured,” Giglio said. To read more about what ancient Roman dump sites can tell us, go to "Trash Talk."
