Archäologisches Zeichnen: Ein Trinkhorn

I am Petra Alt-Evers, I work as an archaeological draughtswoman in the LWL-Archaeology for Westphalia in Münster. In this video, I will show you how schematic drawing works on the scabbard of a drinking horn. This scabbard made of holders is part of a drinking horn, a so-called rüthorn. This is a drinking vase of oriental tradition that could not be ordered. It was probably used in Roman cult connections and is 2,000 years old. Many vessels of this kind often end in an animal head at the bottom. Here is a rüthorn with a very similar glaze and color. I mirror it to see better where exactly my scabbard fits into this basic shape. A close look shows a yellowish glaze, unregulatedly thickly applied and already flattened in many places. And an olive branch. Almost spherical olives and long, narrow leaves alternate symmetrically. For this film, I work on schematic depictions of the glaze and stylized, i.e. simplified, forms of the olive branch. I start with the normal archaeological drawing. In the pre-drawing, I directly mark the flattened areas. I leave them blank. I also work out olives and olive leaves a little more clearly. The cuts show the exact relief. All the data on the outline and scale will come later to be able to classify the drawing. In the actual drawing, I stylize the olive branch even more, so that it is still close to what I see, but also shows a slightly simplified symmetrical basic structure. I model with dots, light and dark, so that it looks plastic. Now I also take out the outer lines at the white spots, so that I can clearly see where exactly the deformations are. And here is the scan of the drawing. This is now the first form of the schematic representation. But now I don't see that the original is colored in this drawing. So I put a color surface underneath in Photoshop, clearly uniform throughout, exactly where I can see the glaze on the object. This is what it looks like today, the slice with yellow, flattened glaze. As another option, I fill in the white spots with color and retouch everything back to an optically smooth structure. This is the reconstruction of the glaze. This is probably what the entire surface looked like before. Now I schematize the olive branch. Clearly outlined color surfaces show the basic structure of the olive and leaf and the symmetry of the branch. I emphasize clearly elongated notches on the leaves. They can only be seen very clearly in the original. And if I now lay a line around it and remove the rest, I get the totally reduced schematic drawing. We agreed on that, that should be our result now. The focus is here on the olive branch. And because there is still a top slice, I can now also reconstruct the edge in this way. I put the animal head at the bottom, compared to the rhythm that we already have. In addition, the cuts, which I had already drawn. And because I know the top slice, I can also reconstruct the edge in the cut here. If you compare the drawing, you can see that the slice is a little conical at the bottom. That's why I adapted the animal head. Its shape ends up narrower. So there is the original slice, the archaeological drawing, in which I leave the surface of the glaze white. Then the coloration with a schematized surface in yellow, as I see it at the moment. Then the reconstruction of the whole. This is what it would look like if the entire glaze was still there. The flat basic shape of the olive branch, where the notches of the individual leaves are also added. And then the strongest form of schematization. Everything consists only of simplifying outlines. Finally, I can say that there are many, many ways to draw special aspects of finds in a schematic way. What exactly, how, for what purpose and in what medium should it be represented? These questions are discussed in detail with the responsible scientists in advance. They want to implement their knowledge and their point of view. As a draughtswoman, I also bring my stylistics and my design ideas with me. A schematic drawing is always a kind of uniqueness. The result is relative. It is determined by the participants and is of course also changeable and debatable. And this is also true here. A schematic drawing shows information that a simple photo cannot transport.