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J. Zöldföldi, P. Hegedüs, B. Székely:
"MissMarble: An internet-based interdisciplinary data base of marble for archaeometric, art historian and restoration use";
Talk: Archaeometry Workshop, Hungarian National Museum, Budapest; 2008-11-03.

Prehistoric pottery used to serve mainly, almost exclusively, simple everyday needs - cooking, tableware, storage etc. It is rarely transported beyond tribal/cultural boundaries over large distances. There are some notable exceptions to this rule. Some prehistoric cultures could produce pottery of artistic beauty and high craftsmanship that technically and artistically surpassed the level of general knowledge of the age. One of them is Middle Neolithic Bükk Culture in Northern Hungary and Slovakia, a late constituent of the big Linearband Pottery Complex. The extremely decorative vessels often had, literally, egg-shell thin walls and delicate incrusted decoration that would make them competitive to any modern artistic pottery. The known distribution of the Bükk Culture fine pottery extends from the Adriatic cost to Little Poland whereas the quarters of the Bükk Culture were limited to a relatively small area in and around the Bükk and the Tokaj Mountains, respectively.

Our investigations centred on some basic questions of Bükk pottery. In connection with a major project on Neolithic pottery production in Hungary and its relation to potential sources of raw material, some important sites of Bükk Culture were investigated (Aggtelek-Baradla cave, Borsod (Edelény)-Derékegyháza and Felsővadász-Várdomb), outside of this research framework another Bükk Culture´s site (Sajószentpéter-Kövecses) was also sampled. The complete sample collection contained 36 ceramic (fine pottery and coarse household ceramics) and 23 local soil/sediment samples. Our aim was to find out whether special raw materials were selected and/or individual recipes applied for fine Bükk pottery, and if it is possible to fingerprint Bükk ware by archaeometrical methods, which will be of essential help in the study of Bükk 'exports', established by stylistic/archaeological arguments. In order to get information on the temporal development or continuity of the raw material usage together with the Bükk Culture ceramics some pottery fragments from other archaeological periods (Bronze and Iron Age) but from the same sites were also collected.

The framework of the archaeometrical study involved polarising microscopic petrographic observations, mineralogical characterisation by XRD method and instrumental geochemical investigation using XRF. Applying the same methodology on archaeological and comparative raw material samples made it possible to observe the similarities and differences from archaeometrical point of view.

Although the investigated sample collection was limited and covered only few sites, preliminary data on the Middle Neolithic high quality pottery manufacturing of Bükk Culture could be gained. It became clear that the representative fine ceramic fragments can be clearly distinguished from both the coarser ware and the comparative local sediments by using a petrological-geochemical-mineralogical discriminative investigation. Our results show that the detailed systematic analysis of an amount of Bükk fineware will surely expose the origin (workshops) and recipes (special manufacturing technology) of the high quality pottery making. In addition, complex analytical featuring of the material makes it possible to create the parameters of the most probable raw materials.