Un progetto internazionale sulla ceramica invetriata tardoromana a Carlino e nell'Europa centro-orientale

Francesca Sbarra, Chiara Magrini,

Abstract

From 1999 to 2006 it has been carried out a study on glazed pottery from Carlino (UD). This study allowed to interpret the materials as a complex and selected production, made for a restricted market (maybe right the one of military supply) and to focus on its relations with glazed pottery productions which come from the Alpine area and Danubian provinces. The 2007-2009 International project on Late Roman Glazed Pottery in Eastern Alpine area and Danubian provinces was designed to understand whether these productions could be connected to one another on the basis of a common technological know-how. To this aim many scholars have been involved from Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Bulgary, Hungary, Serbia and Slovakia; archaeological and archaeometric analyses have been carried out on a considerable sample of glazed pottery contexts and two workshops have been organized on these topics.

In all these areas the production structures seem to be extremely scarce and are represented mostly by small kilns of a circular or quadrangular shape, around which there seem to be no other structures devoted for the glazed pottery production. More complex production systems have been found in Savaria (Hungary), but their functionality is still far to be easily reconstructed; it would be interesting to investigate the reason (on an economic and/or technological level) for this different production structure, applied to a workshop which seems to have only produced glazed pottery. It is also more and more evident the necessity to combine powerful tools such as geochemical analysis and geochemical tracers for metal provenance studies, and archaeometric analyses in order to detect different pottery productions and focus on technological knowledge to better understand the production processes of glazed ceramics.