Csornay Boldizsár - Dobos Zsuzsa - Varga Ágota - Zakariás János szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 99. (Budapest, 2003)

DÁGI, MARIANNA: 'Tinkers' and 'Patchers': Some Notes on the Ancient Repairs of Greek Vases

was not of a special kind: they needed drills, files or polishing stones to trim the fractures, a hammer for hammering the metal staples and pins into the holes, a pot for melting lead, and finally a stick to drive the melted metal in form. Regarding the supposed equipment and the reconstructed techniques and the material used, the mending could take place even in a pottery workshop, with the advantage of sherds at hand for 'patching'.

63 At the present state of the problem there is no evidence for assuming the existence of the same kind of craft for mending pottery in Antiquity as that of a tinker in modern times.

64 The present study concludes that a more representative corpus covering different places and periods may give us the possibility of drawing a better picture. The study of vase repair customs should concentrate on different periods to counterbalance the emphasis in this problem caused by the great number of examples from the Attic pottery of the 6

th and 5

th centuries BC. S. Pfisterer-Haas also points to this possibility. To support this hypothesis she cites a pelike in Berlin on which the cracking that developed during drying was repaired with lead (Pfisterer-Haas 2002, 56). The hypothesis can be strengthened with the examples of repaired items of pottery with alien fragments, in which case the fragment used for completion was not contemporaneous with the vase under repair. See Bothmer, op.cit. (n. 12) 10. On the modern tinkers in Italy and Greece, see Hampe - Winter 1965; on pottery mending, see ibid., 19, 60-62, 197-198, 238.