Gamla cooking ware is best attested from the excavations at Gamla, a town occupied from the 2nd c. BCE until its destruction by the Roman army in 67 CE. It is the most common of the various cooking wares found at the site. Gamla cooking ware has a smooth texture, a moderate amount of small rounded black inclusions, and is a muddy dull dark brown in color (10R 4/3 – 2.5YR 3/2). One small manufacturing locale is known, at a site called el-Jumeizeh, located only 2 km north of Gamla itself -although rugged topography makes the journey about an hour by foot. David Adan-Bayewitz has identified at least two different chemical groups (Adan-Bayewitz 1993, pp. 165-170), which is evidence for multiple small workshops. Yet it is virtually impossible to differentiate these sub-groups by eye. As the locales must all have been located within a short distance from each other, and as their products are contemporary, it seems best to consider Gamla cooking ware as a single ware family.
The first positive chemical identification of Gamla cooking ware comes from cooking pots and casseroles in forms identical to those in Kfar Hananya ware, which were produced in the workshop at Kfar Hanaya in the lower Galilee; these are known as casserole type 3A and cooking pot type 4A (Adan-Bayewitz 1993: 149). The Kfar Hananya versions are dated from the middle of the first century B.C.E., and it is reasonable to suppose that the Gamla versions are of the same general date. There is, however, no evidence for priority of manufacture (i.e., who copied whom). While current scholarly consensus identifies the origin of shapes produced by both Kfar Hananya and Gamla potters as Kfar Hananya, it is possible that cooking ware production began earlier in the southern Golan than in the lower Galilee and that some shapes were first devised by the potters around Gamla. The ware of some earlier cooking vessels found at Gamla is also very similar to that of chemically identified Gamla cooking ware. Thus, while the earliest Gamla cooking ware may be scientifically attested by the mid-first century B.C.E., it is likely that manufacture began before that time.
[1] Adan-Bayewitz 1993: 149.
