Chapter 5, Potting Traditions, Craft Learning, and Product Innovation, investigates traditions in production through intergenerational learning and then considers how product innovations are introduced. Moving beyond models that privilege consumer demand as the primary driver for product change, this chapter balances consumer interests with those of the workshop and long-established local potting traditions.

Chapter 3, Process, People, and Working Conditions, focuses specifically on the labor dynamics of these workshops in order to appreciate how the workplace and production process structured the working lives of complex labor groups with different specializations, statuses, and working conditions.

Chapter 1 introduces the themes, objectives, and chronological and geographic parameters of the volume. It also argues for the importance of potters as a usual case study for everyday professions of the Romans. This is because, while we have relatively few textual accounts about potters, it is nonetheless a profession that has left extensive and easily recognized archaeological remains, as well as ubiquitous and well-studied products.

Chapter 7, Internal Social Dynamics of Industry Clusters: Cooperation and Competition, considers the important role of workshop nucleation in creating communities of production, which witnessed complex dynamics of collaboration, as well as competition among workshops.

Chapter 8, Urban Industry, Topographies, and Community Relations, looks at pottery workshops in urban contexts; often seen as urban outcasts relegated to peri-urban areas, the place of ceramic workshops is instead seen as dynamically placed between a range of push-and-pull factors that change through time and through the history of cities.

Chapter 4, Cultural Practices and Ritual Lives of Potters in the Workshop, uses the archaeology of these workplaces to reconstruct daily life in the workshop. More than simply an economic hub of manufacturing, the workshop comes to be seen as a place of social experience and meaning to its occupants.

The concluding 9 draws together and reflects upon the complex social relationships and small-scale community dynamics observed in these industries.

Chapter 2, Workshops: Models versus Practice, relates the archaeological evidence of pottery workshops from the eastern Mediterranean within several well-established socioeconomic models of production organization. Then, drawing on more recent theoretical approaches, it considers alternative arrangements as reflecting important cultural practices.

Chapter 6, Socially Embedded Technologies and Local Technological Styles, looks at the technologies of production, particularly pottery wheels and kilns, in order to contextualize the technological choices and innovations made in the workshops of the eastern provinces.