500 Kč

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Volume 75 Archeologický ústav AV ČR, Brno Brno 2023, 179 p. ISBN 978-80-7524-072-9, ISBN 978-80-7524-073-6 (pdf) DOI: 10.47382/arub2023-05 ISSN 1804-1345

Fragments of Great Moravia. Pottery marks as a tool for research of the social and political complexity of the 9th-century Moravia

The book, based on the author’s dissertation, uses a specific archaeological assemblage of pottery marks in an attempt to better understand the level of social and political complexity of early medieval, and especially Great Moravian, society. In the opening chapters, the author created a model of the economic and social complexity of 9th-century Moravia to fully exploit the potential of this archaeological assemblage. In the model, he elaborates on the interrelationship between the nature of power institutions and the nature of the contemporary economy, in the context of which the vessels with marks on their bottoms were produced and distributed. This model, which primarily focuses on the presumed core of Great Moravia and considers it as a power-decentralized milieu, is subsequently tested by the assemblage of ceramic fragments with pottery marks from the contemporary power and economic centres in Mikulčice, Břeclav–Pohansko, Staré Zámky in Brno-Líšeň, Staré Město (Uherské Hradiště District) and the burial sites in Prušánky and Nechvalín. The results of the mutual comparison of individual imprints of pottery marks and the analysis of their spatial distribution correspond to the assumptions derived from the theoretical model. They thus both present the potential for further detailed study of this archaeological source and provide the unorthodox model of Great Moravia its basic credibility.