Abstract
Ceramic pyro-technology addresses not only technological issues concerning pottery production but also a wide range of social behaviours and cultural aspects. In this regard, the current research focuses on a specific class of objects, the kiln spacers, which emerged from two rescue excavations at the site of Mantova. Mantova is known to be an Etruscan centre founded in the 5th BCE during the so-called "colonization phase" of the Po Plain (6th-5th centuries BCE), a fertile crossroads area where different peoples were living. Even though the interest in this territory is spread among scholars, a deep study of the production activities is still missing.
The objects of this presentation are 14 ring-shaped spacers for kilns, simple supports that allow the separation of the pots into the cooking chamber to optimize their firing. A detailed analysis of the mineralogical characterization of the spacers has been achieved by the application of X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD) combined with scanning electron microscopy (SEM), alongside an accurate investigation of the ceramic petrography. The aim of the analysis is to gain a wider understanding of the temperatures that occurred during the firings and the duration of fire exposure. The set of experiments, instead, provides the knowledge of the correct function of the instruments and their correlation to specific pottery shapes.
It frequently happens that the people living in a border zone tend to be seen with a fascination for the difficulty to named them with specific labels. Due to their geographic position, they share characteristics of different cultures, adopting some features and rejecting others according to what they perceive as proper and representative. It is then intriguing trying to grasp these people by looking not only at the material culture but at the technological choices lying behind the production activities.