"Fashion changes, but style endures" - Consumer preferences in the late archaic and early classical graves of the Athenian Kerameikos

In the last third of the 6th century BC, experimentation began in Athenian pottery workshops, during which new shapes and decorative techniques were developed. As a result of this process, the red-figure technique, which appeared around 520 BC, quickly took over the leading role from the previously dominant black-figure technique. The vase painters and workshops using the more archaic decoration technique, unable to compete with their red-figure counterparts in terms of artistic quality, switched to mass production by increasing the number of finished products and reducing the detail of their figurative decoration. In this paper, I present the preliminary results of a project carried out as part of the current University Doctoral Research Fellowship Programme. The research focuses on low-quality vases found in tombs dating from the late Archaic and early Classical periods to explore the formal, decorative and thematic preferences of the Athenian consumer public.