Articles by Katalin T. Biró

Editorial notes for the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the UISPP 4th Commission (Budapest, Hungarian National Museum, 5-6 June 2009)

Most Neolithic pottery, except for some high quality fineware, is thought to be made of local material. However, in order to be able to conclude whether certain types of fineware were contemporaneously imported or not, considerable archaeometric analysis is required as well as the systemization of the acquired data. The development of CeraMIS, an interdisciplinary database management system for analytical results of raw materials for pottery (geological samples of clay and temper) and pottery artefacts (archaeological samples) is modelled on earlier ceramic provenance studies. It is an innovation established as part of a German-Hungarian bilateral project on "Long distance trade in Neolithic pottery". The database management system contains two main components: the SQL database and the software CeraMIS that organizes the storage of data. Applying a logical, already traditional methodological procedure of provenance analysis on archaeological pottery, in this paper results of petro-mineralogical and geochemical investigations of the samples are presented. The collection of results on surface treatment (painting, slip, and other techniques), investigations by non-destructive, high-resolution methods is also an important part of this procedure. Moreover, one of the important features of the database is that of clarifying the differences between analyses made on complete vessels, shards, the clay paste, temper and surface treatments. To present the results of these complex investigations and make the information available to specialists involved in this field of research, we have developed a software solution based on client/server architecture. The client software CeraMIS connects the server via the Internet, so that the user does not need to install any additional software. The database can be queried using traditional search methods. The system is designed in a way that makes further amendments and extensions possible without loss of data. It is updated and tailored according to the experience acquired during its use. The system functionalities, data structure and data content are regularly revised according to the requirements of the users and data providers.

Publishing provenance data on the Internet requires the integration of various resources, some of them easily accessible, some of them costly and protected by various copyrights. The work is based on thematic and archive maps, special fieldwork and research projects, data published in technical literature and stored in related databases. This paper will survey the accessible resources used for creating an “Atlas” of prehistoric raw materials for the Carpathian Basin, both commercial and public domain elements and will concentrate on the additional new value as well as problems of continuous maintenance. New developments in supporting reference collections at the Hungarian National Museum will be discussed as well.