Atlante delle ceramiche enotrie matt-painted: forme, tipologie, motivi decorativi e produzioni

This PhD research project aimed at the creation of a general typological atlas of Oenotrian matt-painted pottery (also known as the West-Lucanian matt-painted), with an analysis from the 8th century B.C. to the beginning of the 5th century B.C., stems from the need to systematise a quantity of ceramic material that, until now, has been studied in a segmented and compartmentalised manner. To date, a comprehensive study of this particular ceramic class is lacking. The matt-painted pottery of the Oenotrian area is known essentially from necropolises and is attested in a specific geographical area comprising central southern Basilicata, southern Campania and upper Tyrrhenian Calabria, where the indigenous peoples who inhabited it are defined as ‘Oenotrian’ by literary tradition and which archaeologically fall within the sphere of Tyrrhenian Fossakultur due to the adoption of a specific funerary ritual in which the deceased are laid supine and the local ceramic productions (matt-painted) are common to the entire area in question. The first step in tackling this classification work was to try to define the settlement boundaries of the Oenotrian peasantry within which to move the research (an area that coincides with the spread of ceramics of the so-called West-Lucanian Class); ‘boundaries’ that to date, on the basis of archaeological investigations, are far from well defined. The present typological study does not claim to be complete or definitive, but rather aims to be a useful tool to arrive at a preliminary systematisation of the vascular corpus of matt-painted Oenotrian ceramics. The methodology used is morphological-formal rather than functional. For the construction of the typology, we started from the published data to which we added a lot of unpublished material from the research carried out in the warehouses of the Potenza and Matera museums. The matt-painted ceramics found in the sites of the Oenotrian compartment, from the 7th century B.C. onward, present characters of uniformity and cohesion, yet each settlement manifests its own craftsmanship character, in the particular use of color within the decorative syntax, in the vascular repertoire adopted, and in the elaboration of motifs that become a sort of trademark.