Plastic raw materials in Neolithic pottery production

The paper is dedicated to the investigation of various natural silts as the most ancient type of raw material used in pottery production. The authors describe the specific features of the composition of plain and mountain silts, and discover the same features in ancient ceramics from different regions in Russia. It can be concluded that silts were the earliest raw material used, a tradition that faded away during the evolution of pottery production.V članku predstavljamo raziskave različnih vrst naravnega mulja, ki predstavlja najstarejšo vrsto surovine za proizvodnjo lončenine. Opisujemo specifične značilnosti sestave mulja, dosegljivega tako v ravnini kot v gorah, ter jih primerjamo z najstarejšo lončenino iz različnih regij v Rusiji. Sklepamo, da predstavlja naravni mulj najzgodnejšo vrsto surovine za izdelavo keramike, in da se je ta tradicija proizvodnje lončenine sčasoma izgubila

The Transitional Justice and Foreign Policy Nexus: The Inefficient Causation of State Ontological Security-Seeking

How does an approach towards transitional justice produce preconditions for a country’s international action, enabling certain policies and practices in the immediate neighborhood and international society at large? This article unpacks ontological security-seeking as a generic social mechanism in international politics which allows to productively conceptualize the connection between a state’s transitional justice and foreign policies. Going beyond the dichotomy of transitional justice compliance and non-compliance by gauging the role of states’ subjective sense of self in driving their behavior, I develop an analytical framework to explain how state ontological security-seeking relates to major transitions and consequent state identity disjuncture, the ensuing politics of truth and justice-seeking, and its international resonance in framing and executing particular foreign policies. I offer a typology of the international consequences of states’ transitional justice politics, distinguishing between reflective and mnemonical security-oriented approaches, spawning cooperative and conflictual foreign policy behavior, respectively. The empirical purchase of the purported nexus is illustrated with the example of post-Soviet Russia’s limited politics of accountability towards the repressions of its antecedent regime and its increasingly self-assertive and confrontational stance in contemporary international politics