Red Slip Beaker with a Relief Ornamentation from the Eastern Black Sea Area

Abstract

From 2014 on, the archaeological excavations of the Roman fort of Apsaros (Gonio, eastern Black Sea area) concentrated in the central area of early buildings, where a large architectural complex from the second half of the first to the first half of the secondcenturies AD was located. This structure probably was a praitorion, the residence of the garrison commander. There was an ancient looters’ pit discovered in one room; it appeared in relation to the construction works in the fort in the late second or early third century AD. The most outstanding find from this pit is a fragmented red slip beaker featuring a relief ornamentation. The beaker comprised an elongated conical body survived to the height of 8.8 cm and a ring-foot measuring 3.8 cm in diameter. The outer side of the vessel is ornamented with two rows of impressed ovals arranged as a chess-board pattern and divided by shallow incised horizontal lines. The vessel is unevenly fired: the clay is bright orange at the top and gray at the bottom. Bright orange slip covers the top of the beaker. No direct analogies to this find are known so far. The red slip beakers of a different shape and vase-like vessels with typical ornamentation of impressed ovals occurred among the products of the workshops from the second to fourth century AD located in northern Bulgaria. Similar vessels, also locally produced, appeared on the sites from the Roman period in the south-western Romania. It is considered that such vessels imitated the glass ware which existed in the same period. Although tumblers and beakers with oval designs on the walls were among the most widespread types of glass ware in Eastern and Northern Europe in the late third and early fourth century, their shape could not be considered the complete parallel to the find under study. The closest similarity appeared among the glass ware from the last quarter of the first to the second half of the second centuries AD, particularly conic beakers with a disc-foot ornamented with elongated ovals. The beaker discovered in Gonio probably dates from a similar period. The quality of the slip and the method of its application indicate that this vessel was possibly produced in the Black Sea area.