A contribution to the Medieval archaeology of Milano - From May 1981 to the summer of 1982 the Gruppo Archeologico Milanese has been surveying the digs opened up for street works in Milano.
As a result, a considerable amount of fragmentary ceramic material has been collected.
It was obviously impossible to study the material within a stratigraphical context, and a typological classification has been adopted instead. Two distinct chronological groups have been identified:
a) The Late Antique/Early Medieval period is poorly represented by a few sherds belonging to kitchenware.
b) Most of the material belongs to later medieval times (XV-XVII century):   the polychrome graffito types are predominant (the colours are Ramina, Ferraccia and Manganese, green, yellow, purple); very numerous are also the fragments of glazed ware, glazed slipware and kitchenware. Maiolicas are almost totally absent.
All  the pottery is  of local  production (from  Milano  or Lombardia),  and we're obviously not dealing with luxury tems, but with common ware providing some valuable information on the material culture of mediaeval Milano.
Of course the data are not sufficient to reconstruct a complete picture, and no wood, glass or metal objects are present; all the same we feel our contribution to be important, because so far no similar studies have been published for mediaeval Milano. We also hope that our work will be a starting point for future research.