Head Oles M. Poshyvaylo, senior researcher, Dr Hist.

Founded on November 11, 2000 by a joint resolution of NAS Presidium and Poltava Oblast State Administration within the National Museum of Ukrainian Pottery in Opishne. Since September 1, 2002 it has been a legal entity and has functioned under the NAS Department of Literature, Language and Art Criticism.

Its principal research lines are: scholarly studies of pottery in Ukraine and other countries as a significant element of folk culture; finding regional and universal patterns in the development of pottery craft; studying symbolic and figurative structures of earthenware; research into the current state of Ukrainian pottery, creative work of potters and art ceramicists; studying international achievements in ceramology; organizing field ceramological expeditions; integration of the Ukrainian and foreign ceramology; training research ceramologists.

Major achievements: the process of the organizational structuring of Ukrainian ceramology has been completed; ceramology has been identified as a special study discipline; the academic school of Ukrainian ceramology has been formed; fundamental theoretical issues of this new academic discipline have been defined (its subject and tasks, Ukrainian ceramological sources, principles of preserving the pottery heritage, methods of pottery studies, Ukrainian ceramology and related issues); classification criteria of a modern ceramologist and regulations concerning the attribution of earthenware in Ukraine have been elaborated, scholarly terminology of ceramological studies has been formed; dynamics of Ukrainian pottery vocabulary has been studied for the first time; started have been the studies of ceramological collections and issues of keeping Ukrainian pottery heritage in museums, the history of potter families and dynasties in Ukraine; the pottery craft of Slobodian Ukraine has been profoundly investigated for the first time; the concept of all-round pottery study in one pottery centre has been developed and implemented in the scholarly project ‘The pottery advance of Donbas’; the concept of pottery as a distinctive embodiment of ethnic world view has been worked out; the theory of small pottery centers and the principles of their studying has been worked out; started has been the research of pottery as a historical source for investigations of ancient spinning and weaving, traditional playing culture, the world outlook of the ancient population and tobacco smoking as a means of colonizing Ukraine; comparative analysis has been made for the first time in the world practice concerning the traditional pottery craft in Ukraine and countries of Central, Southeast and Eastern Europe in the context of cosmogony, mythology, semantics, semiotics, philosophy; the issues of pottery craft training in Ukraine in the early twentieth century have been examined thoroughly for the first time and the activities of the leading pottery schools in the period of the Shot Renaissance have been followed in detail; museological advice on the procedure of earthenware attribution has been elaborated; art criticism and literary texts have been analyzed as a socio-cultural phenomenon which forms public notions and ideas, and creates modern historical and cultural myths; professional ceramology periodicals (“The Ukrainian Ceramology Journal”, “Ukrainian Ceramology” and “Bibliography of Ukrainian Pottery” yearbooks have been started).