terra sigillata vessels did not require this burnishing or polishing. Burnishing was a technique used on some wares in the Roman period, but terra sigillata was not one of them. The polished surface can only be retained if fired within the low-fire range and will lose its shine if fired higher, but can still display an appealing silky quality. Medicinal earth The oldest use for the term terra sigillata was for a medicinal clay from the island of Lemnos. The latter was called "sealed" because cakes of it were pressed together and stamped with the head of Artemis. Later, it bore the seal of the Ottoman sultan. This soil's particular mineral content was such that, in the Renaissance, it was seen as a proof against poisoning, as well as a general cure for any bodily impurities, and it was highly prized as a medicine and medicinal component. In 1580, a miner named Adreas Berthold traveled around Germany selling Silesian terra sigillata made from a special clay dug from the hills outside the town of Striga, now Strzegom, Poland, and processed into small tablets. He promoted it as a panacea effective against every type of poison and several diseases, including plague. Berthold invited authorities to test it themselves. In two cases, physicians, princes and town leaders conducted trials involving dogs who were either given poison followed by the antidote or poison alone; the dogs who got the antidote lived and the dogs who got the poison alone died. In 1581, a prince tested the antidote on a condemned criminal, who survived. In 1588 English ethnographer and translator Thomas Harriot wrote in A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia that Algonquians of the mid–Atlantic region treated various sores and wounds with wapeih, a kind of terra sigillata that English surgeons and physicians found to be of the same kind "of vertue and more effectuall" than the contemporary European sort. Roman red gloss pottery In archaeological usage, the term terra sigillata without further qualification normally denotes the Arretine ware of Italy, made at Arezzo, and Gaulish samian ware manufactured first in South Gaul, particularly at La Graufesenque, near Millau, and later at Lezoux and adjacent sites near Clermont-Ferrand, and at east Gaulish sites such as Trier, Sinzig and Rheinzabern. These high-quality tablewares were particularly popular and widespread in the Western Roman Empire from about 50 BC to the