Roman ceramics is the set of productions of very diverse origins, technical categories and marketing or dissemination areas. From local productions resulting from anonymous artisans who meet a very close demand, manufactured with techniques and forms of local tradition, to luxurious and sophisticated tableware with Hellenistic and Eastern influences from famous highly specialized workshops that sign their products and spread them throughout the most remote corners of the Roman world. This phenomenon covers a long chronological space, dating back to the Republican era, with productions such as those from Campania, direct heirs of Attic and Etruscan ceramics, which date back to the century BC. C., until the end of the Empire with manufactures that extend their tradition throughout late antiquity until the dawn of the Middle Ages, that is, more than 1000 years of history.

This space-time area is joined by an enormous functional and formal variety: common table, kitchen and pantry ceramics, storage and transport, amphorae, "Lucerne (lamp)"), commemorative skylights, toilet ceramics or fine and luxury tableware such as terra sigillata, -without forgetting the most modest ceramic construction materials, which supported a building policy without parallel in the ancient world-, make up a immense material and cultural legacy, of substantial value for archaeologists, ceramologists and scholars of Antiquity in general.

Such technical, formal, functional, geographical and chronological diversity is accompanied by a great decorative variety that covers almost all known techniques: painting, incision, excision, burnishing, stamping, chipping, slip or applied relief and perhaps the most widespread of all, molding, which gives rise to the first mass production in history, terra sigillata. Some of these products reached such a level of perfection that today they are considered true works of art.

From birth to death, each Roman inhabitant needed ceramics of all types for all activities of daily life, directly or indirectly. Its presence in everyday life was as constant as plastic is in ours. Such a vast market led to a huge and permanent demand, causing pottery activity to become the largest manufacturing industry of the time. Even the Roman legions had their own workshops, which also meant a great plurality of military productions.

This diversity and consequent abundance represents for archaeologists and historians an extraordinary research challenge as well as a tool of singular value for dating sites, studying commercial flows in each period and place and even for analyzing the penetration of Roman influences among those peoples who, either through trade or conquest, came into contact with Rome. In the field of common Roman ceramics from the Western Mediterranean, the doctoral thesis of the archaeologist Mercedes Vegas, published in 1973, is a reference.[1]​.