Documenting the material knowledge systems of the last surviving traditional potters in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Title
Documenting the material knowledge systems of the last surviving traditional potters in Bosnia-Herzegovina
Location
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Summary Description
In 2022 a team led by Mark Jackson and Richard Carlton (Newcastle University) with Dr Mirsad Sijaric (Zemaljski Muzej, Sarajevo, Bosnia) documented endangered material knowledge related to traditional pottery-making in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The roots of these traditions can be traced archaeologically to the early medieval period in the Western and Eastern Balkans between south-east Slovenia and northern Albania. These traditions have declined from over 100 centres and thousands of potters in 1900 to only four locations in Bosnia-Herzegovina. These traditions display wide variation, typified by use of hand-wheels and forming techniques focussing on coil-building and coil-throwing, as well as open-firing in bonfires or single-chambered kilns.
Our project has documented material knowledge systems from materials sourcing and clay preparation, pottery-forming techniques and firing, to marketing, use and disposal - the chaîne opératoire. We have studied differences between potters’ material knowledge in individual centres (only possible at Liješevo and Ularice) and between the centres. In addition to recording potters using the hand-wheel and bonfire-firing tradition, a single potter in the town of Gračanica, which neighbours Malešiči, was recorded - probably the last-remaining exponent of a separate tradition of pottery-making derived from an eastern, Ottoman or perhaps ultimately Byzantine tradition, which uses kick-wheels and double-chambered kilns to produce a range of pottery mirroring traditional forms. Outside the workshop setting we have recorded the relationships between potter and consumer in local markets and domestic contexts. This record is the most detailed and extensive photographic and video archive of any made with respect to this European pottery-making tradition and will complement existing ethnographic accounts (such as Popović 1956, 1957 & 1959, Kalmeta 1954, Tomić 1966) as well as wider studies which use such accounts to understand wider cultural phenomena (Bringa 1995; Lockwood 1975) and further archaeological interpretation. This project repository contains the edited project data over 4130 files.
General Approach
We visited communities in the villages and towns at Liješevo, Ularice, Gračanica and Malešiči in both April-May and November 2022. These included potters and their families as well as markets in Gračanica, Tešanjka and Jelah and the annual fair at Gračanica in November where pots from Liješevo, Gračanica as well as Zlakusa in Serbia were sold. Potters were contacted in advance of our visits in order to try to ensure that a wide range of activities could be seen and recorded, as well as the workshop spaces and, where possible sites of raw material procurement.

By the end of Trip 2, we had visited ten (10) households of potters as well as seen wares on sale in market venues. During both journeys we also met with our co-Investigator Dr Mirsad Sijarić and his colleagues Lebiba Dzeko and Muhamed Bešlagić in the Zemalski Muzej, Sarajevo and deposited examples of pottery from Gračanica, Ularice and Liješevo with the ethnographic collections department.

Richard Carlton has known most of the participants in our project for many years (some since the late-1980s and 1990s). Since there was already a good level of trust with the participants and an understanding of our aims, we were able to work quickly without the need for long periods of introduction and trust-building.
Specific Techniques
We took photographs, recorded video film and conducted interviews according to the aims of our EMKP project in order to capture as much as possible of the chaîne opératoire for each potter, at each location, from visiting the clay pits to taking the fired pots to market and using them.
We gathered evidence from markets where either the potters themselves or merchants were selling their wares. We also interviewed users of the pottery, using video and photography to recording traditional food preparation and use of the vessels for cooking.
While on site we also made site drawings and artefact drawings, and took photographs of the vessel types. While not strictly part of the EMKP project we mention this as these records will form part of a wider archive.
Our session codes reflect the aims of the project by organising the photos, the videos and their transcriptions by stage in the chaîne opératoire followed by the potter who is involved at that stage.

• Equipment
Photos were collected mostly in Raw+ format. Videos were recorded at 4k resolution. Total photo and video data from Trip 1 came to 895GB (a total of 7,588 photo and video files). On trip 2 we collected 163 GB of data (2,743 photo and video files files). We have not passed on all these files to EMKP since not all are relevant and many are duplicate images, but have selected from these according to the agreed proposal as instructed. We have reduced the resolution of the videos to MP4 to conform to the specifications of the EMKP project and converted RAW photo files to tiff.

• Equipment (incl. ownership after project end) and software used and ease of use

We took with us personal equipment: Canon EOS 800D, a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ1000, an iphone and two personal tripods. We borrowed a Canon EOS 750D and purchased for the project a FujiFilm X-T4 and two Røde VideoMic Pro Rs shotgun microphones, a laptop and two hard drives.

We used Adobe MediaEncoder and Adobe Photoshop to reformat video and photo files from 4k and RAW to MP4 and TIF, respectively. We followed the instructions and had completed the Excel metadata sheet and used various programmes including Total Commander to rename our files but, with hindsight, now think we could have saved a significant amount of time had we used dedicated software such as Adobe Lightroom to do the initial photograph sorting, adding of keywords and session codes and renaming tasks before attempting to fill in the EMKP Excel spreadsheet.

• Methods of analysis and results
We went through the photographs and videos choosing the best examples to include in our assets archive and deciding which videos should be transcribed (many showed activity without discussion, while some included discussion not worth transcribing, and a large minority included useful discussion).
While we submitted to EMKP only a proportion of the files collected in the field, given the significance of the project, we felt it was important to provide a detailed record. The importance of this decision to capture as much information as possible was emphasised to us as we were preparing our data and reporting when we heard that one of the participants had died.

• Data and asset management, storage
All photographs, videos and other documents (e.g. photos of signed permissions forms) were backed-up at the end of each day to two hard drives which were stored separately. These are now also stored on Newcastle University’s Research Data Warehouse.