Lajkó Orsolya: „Cserepén ismerem, minemű fazék volt..." (Szeged, 2015)
Irodalom
197 „I know it by the sherd what kind of pot it was” Data on the research on early modern pottery manufacture and the origins of Hungarian folk pottery It is a great professional challenge to write a book on early modem pottery, especially on its archaeological and ethnographic aspects, since Hungarian research is only in its infancy in this area. In other European countries (e.g. Germany, Italy, Poland) the study of archaeological materials is well integrated into the study of the material culture of the 17th-18th centuries. Especially in the research on the reconstruction of the vessel sets of households and the technological level of pottery manufacture the large amount of ceramic material found in urban excavations has been playing an increased role. Although the number of works publishing such materials has grown during the past few years, the archaeological analysis of modem pottery is still unusual despite the fact that this is the future path of this line of research. Without archaeological methods not even 19th-century pottery manufacture can be fully understood. The pottery held in ethnographic collections cannot answer certain questions due to its character, and its methods are not suitable to widen the source material. I consider myself lucky as an archaeologist-ethnographer to have been able during the past few years to analyze a number of early modem pottery assemblages from the southern Great Hungarian Plain. Here I sum up the methodology and results of the study of an assemblage of almost 6000 sherds and about 50 complete, partly restored vessels from two sites in Hódmezővásárhely: Kossuth Square-Otemplom (Old Church) and Bocskai Street-Buszállomás (Bus station). These pottery assemblages can be regarded representative for the period and the given region, thus their evaluation provides an opportunity to answer a number of research questions on the pottery of the period and to raise new ones. The focus of the study are the archaeological, typological analysis of the assemblages, the regionally developed vessel terminology, the analysis of the regional and historical characteristics of the pottery, the revelation of idiosyncrasies and the exploration of their relationship to contemporary European culture. Beyond the publication of the archaeological material and its typological analysis, we carried out an interdisciplinary research on the relationship between archaeological and ethnographic pottery and the origin of folk pottery from Hódmezővásárhely. During our research we used the description of pottery in contemporary historical and archival sources (last wills, inventories, guild limitations, court regulations, autobiographies, memoirs, etc.) and the conclusions that can be
