PI: Mark Jackson | Collaborators: Richard Carlton, Mirsad Sijarić
Project ID: 2021SG01 | Location of Research: Bosnia and Herzegovina | Host Institution: Newcastle University
In 2022 a team led by Mark Jackson and Richard Carlton (Newcastle University) with Dr Mirsad Sijaric (Zemaljski Muzej, Sarajevo, Bosnia) documented endangered material knowledge related to traditional pottery-making in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The roots of these traditions can be traced archaeologically to the early medieval period in the Western and Eastern Balkans between south-east Slovenia and northern Albania. These traditions have declined from over 100 centres and thousands of potters in 1900 to only four locations in Bosnia-Herzegovina. These traditions display wide variation, typified by use of hand-wheels and forming techniques focussing on coil-building and coil-throwing, as well as open-firing in bonfires or single-chambered kilns.
This project has documented material knowledge systems from materials sourcing and clay preparation, pottery-forming techniques and firing, to marketing, use and disposal – the chaîne opératoire. Particular attention was given to differences between potters’ material knowledge within and between individual centres. In addition to recording potters using the hand-wheel and bonfire-firing tradition, a single potter in the town of Gračanica, which neighbours Malešiči, was recorded—probably the last-remaining exponent of a separate tradition of pottery-making derived from an eastern, Ottoman or perhaps ultimately Byzantine tradition, which uses kick-wheels and double-chambered kilns to produce a range of pottery mirroring traditional forms. Outside the workshop setting we have recorded the relationships between potter and consumer in local markets and domestic contexts. This record is the most detailed and extensive photographic and video archive of any made with respect to this European pottery-making tradition and will complement existing ethnographic accounts as well as wider studies which use such accounts to understand wider cultural phenomena and further archaeological interpretation.
Methodology
The project team visited communities in the villages and towns at Liješevo, Ularice, Gračanica and Malešiči in both April-May and November 2022—see map for locations. These included potters and their families as well as markets in Gračanica, Tešanjka and Jelah and the annual fair at Gračanica in November where pots from Liješevo, Gračanica as well as Zlakusa in Serbia were sold. Potters were contacted in advance of visits in order to try to ensure that a wide range of activities could be seen and recorded, as well as the workshop spaces and, where possible sites of raw material procurement.
Selected Assets
The following provide an overview of the project’s facets.
Local context
Interviews
Mineral processing
Decorating vessels
Kiln facilities
Sales
Workshop context
Mixing clay
Forming vessels
Tools
Completed wares
Using wares
Acknowledgements
This project would not have been possible first and foremost without its Bosnian knowledge holders and their families. Richard Carlton was instrumental in forging these connections thanks to his decades of experience in the region.
Mirsad Sijarić liaised on behalf of the project with the Zemalski Muzej, Sarajevo, as well as with local assistants Muhamed Bešlagić and Aida Čengić. They provided recording and translation-transcription assistance, respectively.
With additional funding from Newcastle University, the project recruited metadata and record-keeping assistance from MA students Gulfareen Chohdry and Abbie Rogers.