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The ceramic bowl from Villanders-Plunacker
The residents of the newly established villages learned to make pottery. The ceramic vessel from Villanders-Plunacker is a lightly fired clay bowl that was found at a Neolithic site in Isarco Valley south of the Main Alpine Ridge. The outer wall of the vessel is decorated with a carved network pattern. The find dates back to the end of the 6th millennium BC and provides some of the earliest evidence of pottery-making in this region.
The oldest pottery-making cultural group in the southern Alpine region is known as the Gaban group. It developed around 5000 BC under the influence of cultural groups from the Upper Italian Po Plain. Its characteristic work includes impresso pottery and vessels with incised geometric patterns such as this bowl.
- The birth of the bowl – clay becomes pottery
- Shape, decorate, fire – a vessel is formed
- Permanent dwellings and farmland
- The work of restorers – broken crockery brings luck
The birth of the bowl – clay becomes pottery
Pottery-making requires clay. This is formed over millions of years by the weathering of rock to form a fine powder that solidifies to form argillaceous earth. Before it can be used to make pottery, however, clay must first be cleaned and in some cases an opening agent such as sand or wheat chaff has to be added to it. Only in this way does clay acquire the composition needed so that a vessel made from it will retain its shape. As long ago as the Neolithic period, people in Europe developed various techniques for making pottery.
Shape, decorate, fire – a vessel is formed
In the Neolithic period people in Europe used three different pottery-making techniques.
In the hollowing-out technique a solid ball of clay is hollowed out. All that is then required is to shape the resulting vessel wall to make it more even.
In the beating technique a solid ball of clay is flattened out and then placed over a rock or over the potter’s knee. It is then struck repeatedly with a wooden mallet so as to produce a hollow vessel. Coil-type vessels, on the other hand, are made by placing coils of clay over one another and smoothing them to form a single object. This technique was used to produce the ceramic bowl from Villanders-Plunacker.
While the clay is still moist and about as firm as leather, the surface is easy to decorate. Only after doing this did Neolithic pottery-makers fire their vessels in an open fire. Later they developed kilns.
Permanent dwellings and farmland
During the Neolithic period the way of life of people in Europe underwent a fundamental change. Families settled down in one place. They built permanent wooden houses with wattle walls and mud daub. They obtained farmland by slash-and-burn clearing. Favoured places for settlement in the Alps were sunny terraces in the lower parts of the mountains where crop plants could thrive. The new way of life imposed a need to protect the chosen site of settlement. One’s own territory had to be defended against possible intruders. Towards the end of the Neolithic period some communities therefore moved their settlements to protected high ground.
The work of restorers – broken crockery brings luck
Only a few fragments are needed in order to reconstruct a ceramic vessel. In order to calculate the diameter of a vessel, a rim shard with its lip is placed on transparent paper and the contour traced. This tracing is then transferred onto circular graph paper in order to determine the original diameter of the vessel. The same technique is applied to a bottom shard in order to determine the original diameter of the bottom of the vessel. Based on these dimensions a cardboard stencil is made, and the missing parts of the vessel can be reconstructed with plaster.
