Lietuvos istorijos institutas

The paper deals with bone material from the medieval Viljandi castle in South Estonia. Most of the animal bones belonged to domestic animals, specimens from game were rare. The material from the castle is not typical for food waste, probably it can be interpreted as butchering waste. In addition there seems to have existed a workshop of bone processing or weapon repairing somewhere in the vicinity of the investigated area. Up to now, approximately a hundred artefacts and about 500 pieces of bone working refuse have been recovered from the excavations. The working debris mostly consists of antler fragments; most of the artefacts are also made from antler.

In this article, the shape of 14th–15th century pottery from Subačiaus Street 11, Vilnius, is analyzed through the application of big data analysis techniques (relational data model, Structured Query Language (SQL), programming language Python, and statistical methods). Two main tasks were carried out as part of this study, namely, the classification of the earliest shapes of pottery found in the potter’s workshop in Vilnius and the implementation of IT methods in the research of archaeological household pottery of Vilnius. A total of 1628 fragments of the upper part of vessels and complete vessels from two middens were analyzed to discern a morphological relationship of assemblages, to assess the diversity of shapes, as well as similarities and differences in techniques used during production. Further tasks include the classification of the shape of rims, profiles, and decorations. Both middens were found to contain pairs of similarly shaped sherds, leading us to conclude that although production was characterized by similar features, they were not identical—possibly due to minor differences in the chronology of the assemblages, different circumstances of artifacts’ deposition in archaeological layers, or because the two middens were used by several craftsmen with a common work experience.