HOCW73: Terracotta tile with the footprints of the slaves Amica and Detfri. Circa 100 BCE. Pietrabbondante, Italy.

Unknown; footprints and inscriptions by Detfri and Amica
Terracotta tile with footprints, c. 100 BCE, Terracotta
0.67 x 0.94m
Image from Imagines Italicae; drawing by Glynnis Fawkes (after Wallace-Hadrill 2008b, fig. 3.5) 

This is an absolutely extraordinary artefact to have survived from the ancient world. It's a terracotta roof-tile, found in Pietrabbondante in Italy. Originally part of the roof of a temple, what makes this artefact fascinating are the footprints and inscriptions written over it (translation by Katherine McDonald, who has a fantastic blog article on the tile):

hn. sattiieis. detfri
segnatted. plavtad
herennis. amica
signauit. qando. a-
ponebamus. tegila(m)


Detfri of Hn. Sattis signed with a footprint.
Amica of Herens signed when we were laying out the tile.

"Signed with a footprint" – the inscriptions, in other words, explain the accompanying footprints, which must have been impressed in the clay while it was still soft. But what's really fascinating about this is the identity of two signatories: because not only are they both women – they are also both slaves. Sandra R. Joshel and Lauren Hackworth Petersen, in their recent book The Material Life of Roman Slaves ​(Cambridge 2014), give an excellent idea of why this is so extraordinary:

​"The footprints function as signatures of a sort, but they also show something that is otherwise unrecorded, and largely unrecordable, in the remains of Roman cities – the literal footprints of individual slaves ... It is as if the footprints tactically claim a trace of existing, or better yet walking, a trace otherwise largely unrecognized in ancient and modern accounts of life in the city and on its streets."

Joshel and Peterson 2014: 87

It is rare to hear women's voices in the ancient world; to hear those of slaves is even rarer. Even more interestingly, it provides evidence for the literacy of female slaves – and also, their bilingualism, written in two different languages, Oscan and Latin. What's so intriguing about this tile is that it would have originally been placed on the roof of a temple, where no-one would have seen it. Why did Detfri and Amica decide to imprint their feet – proof of their literal identity, their tactile existence – into the tile, and to inscribe it with their names? Was it mere play, or was it something more – a desire to leave something behind, a proof of literacy, or even just a reminder to remember the now-lost lives, bodies and voices of the hidden slaves of ancient Italy?