Unelte din cultura Cucuteni: polonicele din lut între utilitate practică și simbol
Tools from Cucuteni Culture: Ladles made in clay, between everyday use and symbol

Summary/Abstract: The ladle is defined as a kitchen tool, in the shape of a large spoon, having a deep dipper and a long handle, used to remove liquid products from the pot and pour them onto the plate. Objects with a hemispherical, deep bowl, with a diameter greater than 5 cm, having handles longer than 10 cm, are considered ladles. The objects falling below these dimensional limits were considered spoons. It should be noted first of all that complete artefacts of this type, are found rarely. Quite often there are discovered handles detached from the dipper, or fragments of dippers. The attached containers-the dippers-are mostly hemispherical, with or without a profiled shoulder. The numerous objects discovered in the Cucuteni Culture area led us to pay attention to this type of artefact, focusing on the objects in the collections of the Botoșani County Museum. Over time, several objects accumulated and these were not published in the past. We wanted to approach them in terms of their use and morphological characteristics. From the entire batch of objects which can be classified as ladles, found in the collections of the Botoșani County Museum, we chose 20 artefacts that illustrate as much as possible the general characteristics of these utensils. They were discovered in the sixth decade of the 20th century, in sites belonging to phase A of the Cucuteni culture and come from Mitoc – Pârâul lui Istrate, Trușești - Țuguieta, Cucorăni - Medeleni, Cervicești - La Morișcă and Drăgușeni - Ostrov. Studying the objects from the Botoșani History Museum-Archaeology collection, we note that the ladles generally present small inclusions into the clay paste, being mainly classified in the fine and semi-fine category. In this article, we approach the anthropomorphisation of some ladle handles, referring to one of the objects from Botoșani County Museum inventory, as a possible piece from the anthropomorphic category.

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