This chapter considers the behavioral practice of maintenance. Because mainte nance, like reuse, played an important role in governing the formation of the Roman pottery record, it is here subject to comprehensive and detailed treatment, as was reuse in Chapters 5-7. As defined in Chapter 1, maintenance entails the upkeep or repair of a vessel so that it can continue to perform some application.

The Romans carried out four distinct kinds of pottery maintenance operations. These included two upkeep operations – cleaning and resurfacing – and two repair operations – filling/patching and bracing. Cleaning entailed the removal of substances that had been incrusted onto or absorbed into a vessel's wall, resurfacing consisted of the renewal of a coating on the interior surface of a vessel, filling/patching consisted of the filling or sealing of cracks in a vessel or the covering or plugging of holes in a vessel, and bracing entailed the adding of one or more support elements to brace the parts of a cracked vessel and/or to reattach one or more pieces that had been broken away from a vessel. Whereas the two upkeep operations, cleaning and resurfacing, were carried out exclusively during prime use and reuse, the two repair operations, filling/patching and bracing, were undertaken in the context of the manufacture, distribution, prime use, and reuse parts of the pottery life cycle.