The UseLife of Dolia
Most dolia were probably used in or around either an agricultural compound or a horrea [storehouse]. Two or three rows of dolia were also sometimes positioned along the keel of a merchant ship, apparently cemented in place to prevent their shifting, functioning as fixed receptacles for the transport of wine (Tchernia 1986: 138-40; Aubert 1994: 260-61). As has been seen, the pricing evidence indicates that their acquisition represented a very substantial investment of funds, and, given their great weight and bulk, their replacement must have represented a very substantial inconvenience.8 A passage in the Geoponica (6.3) more or less corroborates this inference, stating that due to the substantial inconvenience involved in manufacturing pithoi some people employ old containers, even though this may cause harm to the wine that they wish to store. One can thus assume that great care was exercised to avoid breaking dolia and that they were scrupulously maintained to ensure a long use-life. Passages in the Latin agronomists, discussed in Section 8.1, support the latter assumption.
How prone dolia were to breakage, given the way in which they were used, remains unclear. It seems likely that many examples remained in the same location inside an enclosed and/or covered storage facility for years at a time, ifnot, indeed, for decades, and in many cases they were partially interred (so-called dolia defossa), adding an extra measure of protection against breakage. At the same time, although these vessels had extremely thick walls, the fact that they were manufactured by either the slab building or coiling technique meant that they were prone to fracture along the junctures between adjacent slabs or coils. According to Columella (De re rustica 18.12.7), there was a risk that dolia might break when being heated for coating with pitch, whereas Varro (De re rustica 1.13.6) states that dolia employed for the fermentation of must were sometimes burst by the pressure that built up inside them. The fact that in many instances dolia had wine or olive oil transvased into and out of them on a regular basis from/to amphorae and/or casks - large, heavy, and somewhat unwieldy containers - may have meant that they were particularly prone to breakage in the rim/shoulder area. Evidence from the Caseggiato dei Doli, a storehouse in Ostia, discussed in Section 8.1.3, shows, in fact, that in at least some circumstances dolia defossa were commonly subject to breakage in precisely these areas.
In many cases dolia may have been retired from prime use only when, after a very lengthy period of employment, they had begun to impart a bad taste to their content due to the absorption into their walls of residues, or either were abandoned along with the storage facility in which they were housed or went down with the ship in which they were mounted. It should be noted, however, that in some instances excavations have recovered features that appear to be robbing pits produced by the salvaging of dolia from abandoned structures (Paroli 1996: 253-5; Slane 2004: 361), indicating that the vessels in question were considered still useful either by those abandoning the structure or by other individuals who salvaged them at some later point.
Although there is no direct evidence regarding the use-life of dolia in absolute terms, it seems likely that a significant number of these containers remained in prime use for extremely long periods of time. Ethnographic research indicates that in some cases large storage vessels remain in use for several decades (Rice 1987: 297), and it thus seems plausible to suggest that dolia regularly remained in prime use for up to 20-30 years, and perhaps even longer.
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