Although all but one of the Aqaba amphoras excavated were broken, they formed a cohesive body of material. Some amphoras were simply missing handles. Others had necks broken off as well, while many had broken bodies. Several of the Aqaba amphoras were cleanly broken at the joint where the upper body segment joined the bottom segment. The juncture, a naturally weak spot in the vessels, was obvious on all the narrow conical amphoras. Unlike the evenly spaced rilling elsewhere on the amphora bodies the rilling added to the joint was irregular and generally coarse in its execution. Rilling was present on all the amphoras and sherds excavated, spaced approximately 1.2 cm apart, and apparently done on the potter’s wheel. Rilling started immediately above the toe button, and from there it crafted as a continuous spiral to the neck, interrupted only at the joint. Rilling was peculiar to the eastern Mediterranean in the first millennium AD and has been found on several ceramic forms in a number of sites (Pedersen 2008: 82).
