Pottery represents the most abundant category of portable material culture to come down to us from the Roman world, and it is thus by no means either surprising or inappropriate that pottery studies have enjoyed a position of some prominence in Roman archaeology. Whereas investigations carried out in the early years of Roman pottery research were concerned primarily with questions of typology and chronology, in the 1970s students of Roman pottery embraced the realization that pottery constitutes an important source of information regarding various aspects of the economic life of the Roman world, and much of the research that has been carried out since that time has focused on topics such as the geography, organization, and technology of pottery production; the mechanisms and intensity of pottery distribution; and the consumption, use, and performance characteristics of pottery. More recently, with the introduction into Roman archaeology of theoretical perspectives and research methods drawn from post-processual archaeology and material culture studies, students of Roman pottery have begun to explore ways in which pottery evidence can be mobilized to investigate topics such as the definition of individual and group identity, opening windows onto a range of social and ideological issues, such as native acceptance of and resistance to incorporation into Roman social, political, and economic systems, and the expression of gender in the Roman world.