Plural: History, Culture, Society (Dec 2017)
Precucuteni-type ceramic artefacts from Transylvania (Romania)
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to present the pottery from Alba Iulia-Lumea Nouă (Pl. I-III, IV/2, V/8, VIII, IX/1, 3, X/1-2) and Petreşti-Groapa Galbenă (Pl. IV/1, 3-11, V/1-7, 9, VI-VII, IX/2, 4). The decoration is executed inside the incised parallel lines using the excision technique and consists in the ‘wolf ’s teeth’ and ‘chessboard’. The excised ‘wolf ’s teeth’ and ‘chessboard’ motifs are typical especially for phase I of Precucuteni culture. In the recent excavations, pottery fired using black-topped technique was discovered, also a fragment from a carinated bowl with rounded carina with ‘wolf ’s teeth’ decoration, all typical for the Foeni communities from Transylvania. Now, the repertory of Transylvanian discoveries comprises no less than 37 archaeological sites with Precucuteni-type pottery (Pl. XI). At the present state of research, we do not believe that all these artefacts can still be interpreted as merely Precucuteni imports in Transylvanian settlements. The lack of habitation levels or archaeological features that we can attribute to the Precucuteni culture, especially in the middle Mureş basin, makes it likely that there was a ‘fashion’ of decorating pottery among the communities of the early Eneolithic; thus, the typical decoration was taken up following some initial exchanges and contacts. In our opinion, the inclusion of the ‘wolf ’s teeth’ and ‘chessboard’decoration in the stylistic repertoire of the human communities living in the aforementioned geographic area, constitutes the main explanation of the large number of discoveries of this nature. We believe that especially among the large Neolithic settlements from the middle Mureş basin a significant percentage of the excised pottery had lost its initial ethno-cultural facet. For the moment, from the perspective of the pottery analysed in this paper, a separation between the group of settlements from South-Eastern Transylvania and the sites from South-Western and central Transylvania is taking shape.
