“Among the material culture discovered at the settlement near Milovice, which consists of thousands of ceramic shards, thousands of animal bones, fragments of plaster, several fragments of iron tools, stone mills and grinding wheels, the most interesting find is approximately 40 fragments of one vessel of red-figure pottery, which comes from workshops of the ancient Mediterranean. As for the number of found fragments of this pottery, the find has no parallel in the Czech Republic,” said Stolz.
He emphasized that this is the seventh find of so-called red-figure pottery in the territory of the Czech Republic. “It is a very high-quality work, the container – kylix (cup) apparently comes directly from Greece, from Athens and the surrounding area. We’ll see if we manage to reconstruct at least part of the vessel. Human figures can be seen on the ceramic fragments, which show us mythological scenes or scenes from everyday life. It is quite likely that the motif can be reconstructed,” said Stolz.
The red-figure style of ancient Greek ceramics is characterized by painting with red mineral paint on a black background. It probably originated in Athens at the end of the 6th century BC and gradually spread throughout the Mediterranean.
Photo: Archaia, ČTK
Fragments of ancient red-figure pottery from the 5th century BC.
The investigated settlement from the early Latén period near the village of Milovice u Hořice, dated to the 5th century BC, consists of hundreds of ball pits, which represent the last remains of above-ground residential and farm buildings. Archaeologists also discovered several objects there, so-called semi-earthen houses, about a dozen storage pits and several aluminum for mining clay for the construction of houses and furnaces.
The archaeological survey near Milovice is part of excavations on the route of the future D35 highway in the 10.5 km section between Hořice and Sadová. In addition to archaeologists from Archaia, their colleagues from the University of Hradec Králové (UHK), the Museum of Eastern Bohemia (MVČ) in Hradec Králové, the Regional Museum and Gallery Jičín, the Archaeological Center Olomouc and archaeologists from Slovenia are also participating in the research. Each institution is assigned a specific section. Research between Sadová and Hořice began in September 2022 and should last about a year.
Archaeologists have found a two-thousand-year-old receipt in Jerusalem. It is carved in stone
Cocktail
