subspherical bowl

MCUT 2613

Object type bowl

Fabric Neolithic handmade pottery

Culture/period Prehistory

Materials pottery

Technique handmade

Mint

Production date -4000 / -3000

Museum Museu comarcal de l'Urgell-Tàrrega

Current location Exposició permanent

Archaeological site Balma del Clotar de Vall-llebrera

Township Artesa de Segre (Europa, Espanya, Catalunya, Lleida, La Noguera)

Dimensions 145 x 180 mm

Description

Lightweight hand-made ceramic bowl with thin walls, of which almost half is preserved. Subspherical in shape, it has a convex-concave base and a closed rim crowned by a pointed lip. The outer surface, with areas of brown and black, is well burnished and interior is brown and polished. The fabric is well fired, light brown, very homogenous and refined with fine quartz and mica temper. Between the top of the shoulder and belly, it displays complex decoration of fine and well-marked incisions, made before firing, consisting of two horizontal bands separated by a narrow plain strip. The two bands have a practically identical decorative motif, consisting of two lines of equilateral triangles with the vertex alternately opposite, with the interior filled with oblique lines from right to left, some of which go beyond the surface, which are separated on one side by a zigzag that highlights the decorative motif of the triangles. Bowls of similar type and similar incised decoration, and other impressed or channelled motifs are located chronoculturally in the late Neolithic-Chalcolithic (second half of the fourth and the third millennia calibrated BC). They originated in the south of France and were widely distributed in Catalonia. In the Urgell region we can point to the presence of fragments of vessels with similar decoration at the settlement of Cantorella (Malda) (ESCALA et al. 2014, 147, fig. 13, 1 and 2). Sr. Antoni Bellart collected several ceramic fragments of this bowl and the previous one in the cave of Hoyo de Val-llebrera (Artesa de Segre, Noguera) and he donated them together to the Regional Museum of Urgell (GALLART, RIBES 2001).

Omeka ID 1255