Нижневолжский археологический вестник (Dec 2023)
To the Issue of Manufacturing Stonepaste Architectural Decoration in Ukek
Abstract
Identification of stonepaste pottery manufacturing centers still remains one of the unresolved problems of archaeometry and ceramology. The paper is meant as a presentation of the continued petrographic study of the stonepaste pottery finds from the Golden Horde archaeological sites. It includes the results of examination of 65 petrographic sections. Due to the earlier study, localization of some stonepaste pottery manufacturing sites and even workshops in the Selitrennoye and the Tsarevskoye settlements of the Lower Volga region were substantiated. This paper presents some stonepaste architectural decorations of local production from Ukek in the Lower Volga region. A collection of the thin sections from the waste and from the stonepaste pottery vessels from the Selitrennoye workshops was compared to some imported stonepaste articles. The imported items comprised the early materials dated back to the end of the 13th century, i.e. prior to the beginning of this material production in the Golden Horde, and the underglaze-painted items with lustre, that most probably were not made in the Golden Horde. Distinct differences in the manufactured product compositions have been specified. The imported articles contain fragmental quartz, while the local products from the Selitrennoye settlement are made up of roundish, rolled quartz, amalgamated with clay and subsequently crushed (supposedly fireclay). Examination of the thin sections from the stonepaste architectural decor made in Ukek has made it possible to establish practically complete compositional similarity of the items from the Selitrennoye settlement. This allows us to suggest that there is a common technology for stonepaste pottery manufacturing in the Golden Horde towns located in the Lower Volga region and that it differs from that of the imported articles. Study of the thin section also reveals certain technological inferences. Particularly, the colour of the item is proved to depend on burning temperature and not on the admixture composition.
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