[19 martie 2002]

[…]

I think that an English summary would be very useful, especially as the figures already have English captions. I know that money may be a problem, but I am sure that the Museum has contacts with translators. It would be worthwhile doing, as there is very little on the Web about Slav archaeology at all. If you do have to do it yourself, I would be glad to look at it and if necessary correct the English (its what I do here for a lot of Polish archaeologists).

It is of course not easy for me to use the report because of the language it is written in, quite a lot of the words are similar to French and Latin and I can get a general idea of what you have written about. I think your typology is very useful and I liked the idea of attempting to compare the assemblages in different regions. One thing which I thought was really good was the way you looked at the use of the pots, how liquids would spill from them and also the thermal properties of different shape vessels.

I am interested that you place the sites in Poland "in the middle of the Old Slavic area" ("în plin centrul lumii slave vechi"), but you do not cite the literature on which you base this suggestion. Your suggestion on the basis of the pottery that there might have been two Slavic homelands is very interesting, and is close to some ideas I am working on.

It is not clear to me how you date the sites in Romania, I could not find much in the text concerning the associations of the pottery with coins of fibulae, but this may be because I did not know where to find this information - as you say its over 700 pages.

I really liked the "situation map". Do the Romanians really call the Western Bug the northern Bug? I suppose it makes sense really, one flows south, the other northwards.

Last year I had a book published in English "The early Slavs. Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe" (London 2001) ISBN 0 7141 2804 X and this year I am trying to look at "Material Culture and identity: the Case of the Slavs in Central Europe 500-700AD" which will be looking at the so-called "Prague Culture" and related material and this is the reason why i was so interested in your work, in particular the way you found some regional differentiation in the material.

[……..]

[16 martie 2002]

Dear Dr Teodor,

Please forgive me for writing in English.

I am writing to congratulate you on your excellent web-publication of your thesis 'CERAMICA DE UZ COMUN DIN MUNTENIA DE LA SFÂRŞITUL VEACULUI AL V-LEA PÂNĂ LA MIJLOCUL VEACULUI AL VII-LEA'. As you know there is not much material on the Early Slavs in the Internet, so it is good that you published the text in this way.

I have just finished reading Florin Curta's book "The Making of the Slavs" and therefore I was interested in the material you present in your thesis.

I am an English archaeologist working in Poland and am currently researching the so-called "ethnogenesis of the Slavs" and so it is very useful to have access to the material you present.

Of course the main problem for me is that your work is written in Romanian, but I see that some of the figures have English captions. Are you planning to add a summary in English to the website at any stage? It would be very useful to some of us who do not speak Romanian !

Anyway, once again congratulations on this excellent piece of work and very well-designed website.

Paul Barford

Warsaw, Poland