jats:titleSummary</jats:title>jats:pDebates on the nature of the <jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">R</jats:styled-content>oman city and its relation to the countryside have recently moved towards questioning the validity of the very category of ‘the city’, both analytically and in terms of past reality. While archaeology has long been mobilized within these debates, this paper argues for the unexplored potential of a range of specialist pockets of qualitative knowledge about specific artefact classes. <jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">T</jats:styled-content>erra sigillata, the red‐gloss imperial tableware, is a case in point. By adopting a bird's eye view of sigillata production, distribution and consumption across a geographical and chronological range, this paper develops a new metaphor for the role of <jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">R</jats:styled-content>oman cities: as switching devices in the building of networks. By describing the role of cities in structural rather than categorical terms, this metaphor allows for contingency and for the integration of different analytical and interpretive scales.</jats:p>