Clay Figurines Research Articles

Обрядовые и театрально-игровые основы художественных и педагогических экспериментов Е.В. Честнякова

The idea of a close relation between the work of the original Kostroma artist Efim Chestnyakov (1874-1961) and the traditional peasant culture has been expressed repeatedly. However, there were no direct parallels between the images and plots of his works and the folk rituals of the calendar cycle characteristic of the Kostroma land. In this regard, the purpose of this study is an attempt at a source analysis of the famous paintings by Efim Chestnyakov Our Festival and Festive Procession with a Song. Kolyada and verification of the previously stated hypotheses. For the first time, ceremonial rounds of courtyards on Yuletide and Saint George’s Day, as well as the carols (koliadki) and folk poems (prigovory) performed by their participants, are considered as the authentic basis of the fairy tales, paintings and clay figurines by Chestnyakov and at the same time as the context of the existence of his works when working with local children. Special attention in the article is paid to mummery as a game technique most in demand by Chestnyakov. According to his countrymen, the artist used disguises and masks traditional for mummery both inside folklore rituals, in which he involved his pupils — peasant children, and in theatrical productions based on folklore subjects invented for them.

‘Let My Son Play’: Toys and Games for the Children of the Ancient Near East

ABSTRACT In the Ancient Near East, written and iconographic sources, and objects found in children's graves provide insight into children material culture. Rare finds, like clay figurines, miniature carts, and unique stone objects, suggest a mix of playthings and possibly ritual items. The presence of such items in children's tombs, different from adult burials, indicates a blend of practical and emotional elements in the burial ritual. The ambiguity surrounding these objects highlights the emotional and personal aspect of children's material culture, offering avenues on the complexity of their lives.

Taking the Deer by the Antlers: Deer in Material Culture in the Balkan Neolithic

Prehistoric communities had strong ties with the animal world that surrounded them—animals were prey, sources of food, and raw materials, but also threats and mysteries, and certain animals often had an important place in the symbolic realm. With the process of domestication and the switch to animal husbandry as the main source of animal food, these relations changed considerably, and a certain dichotomy between “the domestic” and “the wild” may be noted in numerous past communities. When it comes to the Neolithic period in the Balkans, domestic animals had an important place in subsistence and economy, and it seems that cattle had a particularly prominent symbolic role. Wild species preserved some of their significance in both subsistence and symbolic realms, especially cervids (red deer, roe deer, and fallow deer). In this paper, the place of deer in the material culture of the Neolithic communities in the Balkans will be analysed: skeletal elements of deer were used for the production of diverse items, including non-utilitarian ones, or were part of ritual depositions, and deer representations are encountered in other materials, such as clay figurines. The symbolic meaning of deer cannot be reconstructed with certainty; however, it is probable that deer were tied with territoriality and the landscape.

Figurative Representations in the North European Neolithic—Are They There?

This article offers a comprehensive survey of figurative finds from Neolithic northern Europe. The survey shows that the immediate absence of figurative representation in the region is real and that the almost complete lack of figuration stands out from the previous Mesolithic and the contemporary northern and northeastern European Neolithic hunter-gatherer groups. Furthermore, the absence of figurative representations contrasts strongly with the thousands of clay figurines that characterize the southeastern European and Anatolian Neolithic. The survey provides a well-documented basis for discussing the significant differences between a figurative southeastern European Neolithic and an imageless northwestern European Neolithic. We suggest that the absence of figurative representations indicates that severe socio-cultural and religious/ideological changes took place within the Neolithic communities as agriculture spread from southeastern Europe via central Europe to northern and western Europe.

Settling down with anthropomorphic clay figurines in eastern North America

Indigenous peoples have occupied eastern North America for over 10,000 years; yet the earliest anthropomorphic figurines were only manufactured in the past several thousand years. This emergence of human figurine traditions in eastern North America is correlated with increased settlement permanence, and community size related to key demographic thresholds. In this study, I present an overview of two previously unreported figurine assemblages from the Middle Woodland period in Illinois and use these assemblages as a jumping-off point to examine the emergence of early human figurines in eastern North America. To illustrate the importance of the correlation between anthropomorphic figurines and settling down, I focus on what figurines do that encouraged the emergence of widespread traditions of figurine manufacture and use as the size of affiliative communities increased. This study involves examining early figurines and their broader context through the lens of a model of the socioeconomic dynamics of settling down in conjunction with an examination of the materiality of miniature 3-D anthropomorphic figurines. Key to this latter perspective is understanding not what figurines represent but what they do.

Red Ladies of Clay

Colour and decoration were prominent features of Neolithic figurines. However, many such details and colours have faded over time, and it is only on close inspection that traces of colour are visible. This paper presents the innovative application to figurines of a technique based on the treatment of images with DStretch, a valuable tool for recovering the visualization of fainted pigments in clay figurines examined from Knossos. The method has the potential to illuminate aspects such as gender, age, status, identity or group affiliation through the study of colour in Prehistoric figurines.

Игрушки и игры как элемент социализации детей северной части Буковины в Х—ХІV вв.

The article considers one of the important elements of the child’s world and discovery process through the games and the toys. These toys and games play an important role during child’s life and are an important element and the way of education and upbringing. Nevertheless, the researchers have paid little attention to this category of artifacts, hardly referring to them in their publications. Clay zoomorphic and anthropomorphic toys took an important place in the culture of the ancient population. In the researched area, explorers have found a clay figurine of an animal and a clay horseman figurine which are the examples of the graphic toy type. Clay Easter eggs (pysanka) and bone whistles belong to the rattling toys. The children’s tableware and «coins» belonged to the category of household items. Various games also played an important role in the upbringing of children and their daily life. For researchers, they are of special interest, since they were not meant just to entertain children, but had a symbolic and magical meaning. Archaeological materials are of great importance due to the small number of extant written sources. The artifacts that were found in the explored area indicate the existence of the chess game. There is also evidence of using the astragalus and dice in the games. We have more opportunities to learn about the life and culture of the local inhabitants of the medieval period in the northern part of Bukovina by studying children’s toys and play accessories.

Intangible cultural heritage image classification with multimodal attention and hierarchical fusion

Designing an efficient Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) image classification is beneficial for the public to recognize the ICH and fostering the preservation and spread of that. Currently, related ICH image classification researches mainly focus on the visual features of ICH images, ignoring attached textual descriptions. However, attached textual descriptions can provide crucial clues for ICH images classification. Therefore, in this study, we propose to combine attached textual descriptions to perform ICH image classification in a multimodal way. Additionally, to capture intra- and inter-interactions between ICH images and attached textual descriptions, we propose a novel model named MICMLF, mainly consisted of multimodal attention and hierarchical fusion. Multimodal attention is employed to make the model focus on “important regions” and “important words” in ICH image and attached textual descriptions respectively. Hierarchical fusion is utilized to capture inter-modal dynamics interactions. Extensive experiments are conducted on two Chinese nation-level ICH lists datasets, New Year Print (年画) and Clay Figurine (泥塑). Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of MICMLF, compared with several state-of-the-art methods. Also, the proposed model can handle the situation where ICH images and textual descriptions are incomplete. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose to combine textual descriptions to perform ICH image classification in a multimodal way.

Profiling the people behind clay figurines: Technological trace and fingerprint analysis applied to ancient Egypt (Lahun village, MBA II, c. 1800–1700 BC)

Clay figurines represent one of the ideal object categories for tracing the profile of their makers since they preserve traces of the maker’s gestures. The scope of the article is to reconstruct the different manufacturing steps of clay figurines, assess the complexity of the shaping sequences and study fingerprints to trace the profile of people who produced such artefacts in the ancient village of Lahun (Egypt, MBA II, c. 1800–1700 BC). The high number of production chains revealed that, despite an apparent roughness, clay figurine production was characterised by high stylistic and technological variability, indicating several levels of skill possessed by their producers. On this basis, Lahun clay figurines were not an extemporary or standardised product. A neat division can be established between anthropomorphic figurines and those representing animals, which show a lower degree of complexity and an attempt not to define clear shapes. Most of the figurines were revealed to be mainly shaped by adults, while children contributed in a marginal way to their production. However, the presence of sub-adult fingerprints on some of the clay figurines indicates that children were active agents producing material culture and integrating part of the adult production process through cooperation and/or playing.

A Unique Assemblage of Late Islamic Magical Artifacts from Netafim 2: A Campsite on the Darb al-Hajj, Southern Israel

Abstract Many remains of the Muslim pilgrimage road from Cairo to Mecca, the Darb al-Hajj al-Maṣri are preserved in the Eilat region of southern Israel. These include sections of the road, camps, and other associated structures. Most of these remains date to the Mamluk and Ottoman periods. In one camp (Netafim 2), an assemblage of unusual objects was found, including fragmentary clay rattles, votive clay incense burners, anthropomorphic and perhaps zoomorphic clay figurines, a cluster of colored quartz pebbles, and some seashells. The fabric of the clay objects indicates that they originated in Egypt. Based on the nature of the assemblage and a literary survey, this study suggests that the discussed artifacts were related to popular magic. The magical rituals, whose nature is yet unclear, were likely carried out at the site by professional sorcerers, who offered their services to pilgrims making the hajj.

Керамические звери лесных городищ: игры взрослых с богами или детские игрушки?

The authors believe that the clay zoomorphic plastic figurines from the Early Iron Age settlements of the forest zone (the areas of the Yukhnovskaya, Milogradskaya, Verkhneokskaya and Dyakovskaya cultures) are not votive elements of agrarian cults but children’s toys. These toys as well as miniature vessels, ceramic models of things, clay loaves could be made by children themselves while learning the process of ceramic production. The use of images of wild animals especially predators and toads in agrarian rituals is doubtful. The dominance of horse images in the Milograd-Yukhnovo area seems to be an Indo-European trait associated with mythology and not with farming. In the area of the Dyakovskaya culture with developed horse breeding, attributed to the Finno-Ugric antiquities, there are clay figurines of animals except horses. Profane toys can carry sacred images since myth and fairy tale are closely connected with each other and a toy for a child has many faces and can situationally play the role of a mythical character, a fairy-tale hero, a usual domestic animal. Some figurines become votive objects at the final stage of existence. Toys were sacrificed during initiation into adulthood as in ancient Greece and Rome. Fragments of figurines in ashtrays formed during the annual ritual and sanitary burning of winter straw bedding from houses and stables are often taken as sacrifices. Household garbage trapped in a “cleansing” bonfire is not a meaningful sacrifice.

Modelling India. Unfired clay figurines and the East India Company's collections: from devotional icons to didactic displays

AbstractA well-known series of miniature figures produced in India from unfired clay, appropriately clothed and in many instances represented carrying out their respective secular or ritual duties, enjoyed a period of particular popularity on the world stage in the nineteenth century when they were appropriated as illustrative devices in museum displays and international exhibitions. Over the previous half-century or more they had emerged as products of a dynamic industry that responded to changes in taste as well as religious and artistic practice within Indian society, before being taken up by the West to serve new colonial imperatives. There they received perhaps their most enthusiastic reception at the India Museum, established in the headquarters of the East India Company in London in the early 1800s, and surviving beyond the suppression of the Company itself until they were dispersed to a number of other institutions in 1879. From an early appearance at the Great Exhibition in 1851, the figures also became a regular feature of the international exhibitions of the latter part of the century. Initially they celebrated the traditional crafts and practices of India but gradually were recruited to communicate other messages of Western industrial dominance and perceived artistic and industrial superiority. Although comparatively few of these figures survive intact in Western collections, the history of their considerable impact on the European stage can be enlarged upon with the aid of the documentary record.

Iron Age Terracotta Figurines from the Southern Levant in Context

Iron Age Terracotta Figurines from the Southern Levant in Context

Greek Island Temple Complex Reveals ‘Countless’ Offerings Left by Ancient Worshippers

As appeared in the AP News: Archaeologists excavating a hilltop sanctuary on the Aegean Sea island of Kythnos have discovered “countless” pottery offerings left by ancient worshippers over the centuries, Greece’s Culture Ministry said Wednesday.A ministry statement said the finds from work this year included more than 2,000 intact or almost complete clay figurines, mostly of women and children but also some of male actors, as well as of tortoises, lions, pigs and birds.

The Beauty of the Sculpture of the Tang Dynasty's Lady Figurines

The economic prosperity, open folk customs and the integration of Chinese and foreign cultures in the Tang Dynasty made the clay figurines form a unique plastic art style in this period. This paper analyzes the modeling characteristics of the ladies' figurines in Tang Dynasty, and finds that the ladies' figurines are rich, moist, smooth and soft, which not only satisfies the external visual beauty, but also depicts the inner charm beauty of women in Tang Dynasty. The combination of posture and movement makes the ladies' figurines show the graceful and agile state of the characters. These unique expressions of plastic arts make the ladies' pottery figurines in the Tang Dynasty an indispensable classic among the ancient figures in China.

Clay figurines from Agarak

The archaeological site of Agarak is located southwest of a homonymous village in the Aragatsotn province of the Republic of Armenia. The excavated segment of the Agarak site is the northern rock platform which is divided into two parts by the Yerevan-Gyumri highway. The site was excavated during 2001-2014. Systematic excavations of Agarak revealed that the occupational phases of the stie date from the 29th century BC to the Late Middle Ages. This article discusses the Early Bronze Age figurines discovered in the L10 quadrant of the site. The figurines were found from the surroundings of the retaining wall bordering the rock platform, within disturbed cultural layers outside the retaining wall, resulting from later human activity. The pottery fragments inside the cracks of the rock platform and the lower layer of a dwelling built from cobblestone attest to Early Bronze Age human habitation on the rock platform.

Zoomorphic clay figurines from the Early Bronze Age settlement of Harich

Harich is one of the Early Bronze Age archaeological sites of Armenia. The site is also known with its anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines dated to that period, the subject-matter of this article. These figurins that are now kept in the archaeological funds of the History Museum of Armenia could serve as an important group of artefacts that would help us to deepen our knowledge about the lifestyle and beliefs of the ancient population of that period.

A Study on the Design Strategy of Museum Cultural and Creative Products from the Perspective of Cultural Symbols - An Example of the Clay Figurine Museum in China

A Study on the Design Strategy of Museum Cultural and Creative Products from the Perspective of Cultural Symbols - An Example of the Clay Figurine Museum in China

Late prehistoric period fired clay objects and zoomorphic figurines in the eastern Powder River Basin of Wyoming

Excavation of Late Prehistoric period sites in the eastern Powder Basin of Wyoming has uncovered broken fired clay zoomorphic figurines and fired clay objects. Fired clay figurines and objects in association with a local manifestation referred to as the Thunder Basin phase first appear around AD 600. Shortly after AD 1000 the local use of small diameter cylindrical pit hearths/ovens ceased along with the manufacture of fired clay objects including figurines. Fired clay objects and figurines have been recovered from 15 of the 29 Late Prehistoric period Thunder Basin phase sites excavated to date. The sites are in a 24 km north to south by 25 km east to west area. Complexity of how the fired clay objects and figurines are made varies from simple forming from a lump to modeling around wooden rods that range from 1 to 9 mm in diameter. Some objects retain the charred remains of these rods. The fired clay objects are placed in five categories: zoomorphic heads, zoomorphic snouts or beaks, zoomorphic bodies, cylinders, and lumps.

Apotropaic Figurines from Nimrud (Calah) in the Australian Institute of Archaeology Collection

There are two clay figurines in the Australian Institute of Archaeology’s collection, which were excavated by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq in the 1953 season at Nimrud (ancient Calah/Kalḫu). The figurines were discovered in the foundations of the Burnt Palace and date approximately to the reign of Adad-nīrārī III (810–783 BCE). Their function was a part of an apotropaic ritual to protect places of residence from evil spirits and enemies. This paper aims to bring to light these figurines in the Institute’s collection by offering a descriptive catalogue and an explanation of their use in Assyrian magic for the journal’s readership.