Északkelet-magyarországi és északnyugat-romániai középső neolit festett kerámiák festékanyagának azonosítása Fourier-transzformációs Infravörös Spektrofotometriai (FTIR) módszerrel

Abstract

Middle Neolithic painted ceramics of the northeastern Great Hungarian Plain region have been enriched with new assemblages in Hungary in the last decade. Based on the newly excavated sites, the theory of the different developmental patterns of the neighbouring Hungarian and Romanian part of the Szatmár Plain, previously proposed by Romanian researchers, came into new light. Gh. Lazarovici and C. Virag assumed, that the second period of the Piscolt group shows the fl ourishing of the Middle Neolithic ceramic painting in the Romanian side, while at the same time in Hungary the painting was reduced, and incised decoration increased. The decreasing rate of the painted pottery in the Hungarian Szatmár and Szamos region was explained by its greater distance from the bitumen sources located in the Bihor area. The extensive utilisation of raw bitumen in the questioned region has been mentioned in Middle Age written records and also industrial historical papers in the Modern Age. In the present paper we publish the results of our complex analytical and experimental investigations. First of all by using FTIR spectroscopy we performed comparative analysis on painted pottery samples from Romanian and Hungarian sites and a raw bitumen sample collected from Suplacu de Barcau. The fi rst examination disproved the use of bitumen as ceramic painting, since in all cases the black residues on the pottery surfaces were proved to be wood tar. This result is not so surprising if we consider that the use of wood tar was a Pan-European phenomena in prehistory, while the Neolithic use of bitumen was reported only from the Near East. The painted sherds were compared with experimentally produced wood tar, and with one Early Bronze Age pot from Döge, which was pierced with one hole on the base. The interior of the base fragment showed carbonised remains and on the exterior and within the pierced hole thick and black tarry substance was identifi ed. It can be assumed that we are dealing with a retort, used for distillation of wood tar. The chemical composition of the black residue shows similarity with the experimentally produced tar and with the Neolithic samples as well. Our results demonstrated the utilisation of wood tar in the Middle Neolithic eastern Great Hungarian Plain region as well as later, in the Early Bronze Age, and it was proved that the spread of Neolithic painted pottery was not depended on the bitumen sources of the Romanian Bihor area