Non-Destructive Analysis of a Beaker from Central Slovenia: Imported or Locally Produced Artefact?

During the mid-3rd millennium BC central Slovenia, north-eastern Italy and the eastern Adriatic coast developed similar cultural traditions in pottery production which have been ascribed to the so-called Ljubljana culture. Among the investigated sites of this period, the Deschmann’s pile dwellings near Ig, in the Ljubljansko barje in central Slovenia, in their younger phase of existence (c. 2600-2400 B.C.), are probably the most famous. As many scholars already pointed out, numerous finds attributed to the Ljubljana culture suggest a potential interaction between this culture and the Bell Beaker one: among them, ceramic vessels with a specific ornamentation technique (the so-called barbed-wire decoration), flint daggers, boar’s tusks, metal daggers and awls, and so on. Nevertheless, a small pear-shaped vessel from the Deschmann’s pile dwellings, decorated with a linear band incised motif reminiscent of the Bell Beaker metope decoration, is the only artefact of this type known from central Slovenia. Despite its similarity with the typical beakers of the Bell Beaker culture, no precise typological analogies have been found in the literature. For these reasons, technological and chemical analysis have been carried out on it and comparative pottery materials attributed to the Ljubljana Culture with the purpose to understand if such beaker was locally produced or imported to central Slovenia. Since thefinds from the Deschmann’s pile dwellings cannot be sampled for destructive analysis, we have adopted a non-destructive approach combining X-ray Computed Microtomography (microCT) and Prompt Gamma Activation Analysis (PGAA) to explore their average structural and compositional (elemental) features, respectively. The results obtained so far will be presented at the Conference.