Identification of potential structural coherence based on the ceramic material from provincial necropolis II at Ancient Gerulata (SR) using quantitative analyses

Abstract

The ceramic vessels from necropolis No. II were redocumented during the ongoing revision of archaeological material from cemeteries belonging to the Roman military fort with civil hinterland – Gerulata. This necropolis contains the highest informative value for both archaeological and anthropological material. Therefore, for the needs of this study, a set of pottery was chosen from that particular site, which consisted of approximately 120 complete various-shaped artefacts to be used for volume calculation. The vessels primarily served for offerings but were also partly used as urns. Drawing and photo documentation was used to create 3D models of the individual artefacts. These visualisations were a data source for the quantitative measurement of the volume variations. Models and volume calculations were created in Blender open-source software before identifying a correlation between vessel shape and volume and the graves in which they were found. The main subject of this research was to identify potential structural coherence within the funerary habits using the univariate statistical analysis produced in PAST 3 open-source software.