Shapes and Meaning. The matt-painted pottery of the North-Lucanian district: culture, identity, symbols and Gender. An interdisciplinary study of a local community in Southern Italy.

What were the communication systems of ancient societies without writing? Is it possible to use the decorations and symbols painted on the vases like a new Rosetta Stone? Is it possible to reconstruct the language of archaic communities that have disappeared?

Objects convey ideas, memories and messages, and the ceramic decorations are certainly one of these vectors, of conservation but also dissemination of identity and cultural messages. Although it has all the potential to represent a privileged means of knowledge, most of its meanings still elude us.

The objective of project SandMan (Shapes and Meaning) is to understand the ways of communication between the archaic communities of southern Italy, free of conventional forms of writing, between the end of Iron Age and the Archaic Period (mid-7th/mid-5th cent. BC). To achieve this goal, the project will use three different approaches: semiotic, archaeometric, and typological.

The research aims to conduct a holistic, thus innovative, study of the symbols of ceramics in order to understand the meanings of this symbolic ""lexicon"", better understand how they were important for gender identification/distinction, how they were used as a way to communicate and how that knowledge was passed on to others.

SandMan also proposes a systematic study of the matt-painted vases of southern Italy (to create a precise and reliable typology) and a chemical-physical analyzes, will investigate the fabric of vases with matt-painted decorations for to create a reference database of local workshops.

In general, the studies have always focused on Greek (or Greek-colonial) objects present in the indigenous contexts, relegating the discovery of indigenous ceramics to a secondary position.

This research, instead, using a post-colonial approach, will shift the perspective onto the indigenous material culture, for the understanding of certain bidirectional dynamics of exchange and acculturation between Locals and the ""Others"".