Yasemin Bağcı will defend her PhD thesis, carried out under the supervision of Joanita Vroom, on November 29th 2017:

"Coloured Ceramics of the Caliphs: A New Look at the Abbasid Pottery Finds of from the Old Gözlükule Excavations at Tarsus"

Although the medieval ceramic corpus of the Gözlükule project was found in the 1930s, it was only published in a brief article in the 1940s. This PhD research aims to present and assess the medieval pottery assemblage recovered on the mound of  Gözlükule, Tarsus with an integrated approach, combining the evidence of pottery and other research carried on the medieval eastern Mediterranean in order to understand questions of production and consumption and the socio-economic and cultural dimensions of material culture.

(from Y. Bağcı webpage)

See also the Tarsus page of Joanita's VIDI project and the POMEDOR sites page

For a few months now, Jacques Burlot has been studying production techniques of Western Anatolian ceramics with SEM analyses. The studied samples are specific of ceramic types such as polychrome sgraffito wares (“Fette Ware” type), “Miletus” ware, the turquoise glazed and molded wares.

This study focuses more precisely on the ceramics’ decorative layers which are the glaze and the slip; the SEM analyses enable us to determine their elemental compositions and microstructures.

This work, associated with provenance studies and chronological ones, aims at understanding the way new techniques in pottery manufacture were introduced in Western Anatolia between the Late Byzantine and the Early Ottoman periods.

View under the SEM (backscattered electrons) of the microstuctrure of a ceramics, showing the layers of body, slip and glaze
Photo J. Burlot

Yona Waksman and Jacques Burlot will spend three weeks in Western Turkey working in four archaeological sites (Ephesos [OAI], Pergamon and Miletus [DAI], Sardis [Harvard University]). They expect to study, contextualize, record and sample several medieval ceramic productions and types, in collaboration with the excavations teams and especially with Joanita Vroom (Ephesos), Beate Arslan-Böhlendorf (Miletus) and Sarah Japp (Pergamon).

This sampling campaign continues previous provenance studies of medieval Western Anatolian pottery productions, and aims at completing an already rich corpus of analytical data. New aspects will be dealt with by Jacques Burlot in the framework of his PhD thesis. They concern the transmission and diffusion of ceramics production techniques, through the observation and analyses of the associations glaze/slip/body.