The Amphora from Osor

The paper presents the amphora from Osor discovered during the research excavations in the monastery and church of St. Peter in Osor. It is an urn in the form of an amphora lacking closer comparisons in the adjacent Late Bronze and Early Iron Age cultural groups, but exhibits similarities with the urns of the continental Late Bronze Age, especially the Ruše cultural group. Due to its formal and stylistic characteristics, as well as the results of the radiometric dating, it was attributed to the beginning of the Early Iron Age in Kvarner - in to the second half of the 10th century BC. It was interpreted as the case of individual or burial of the close members of the family which, due to the circumstances buried their dead according to their traditional customs forming a burial that could be recognized as one of the elements demonstrating the growing intensity of the influences from the Urnfield culture to the area of Kvarner. Consequently the amphora from Osor could be comprehended as a symbolic subject of a specific burial rite which indubitably confirms the cognitively clearly recognizable semiotic value in the interaction of the Northern Adriatic and the territory of the continental Urnfield culture at the end of the last prehistoric millennium.