CERAM · First ceramics of Atlantic Europe: manufacture and function

First ceramics of Atlantic Europe: manufacture and function

Complex post-industrial economies are heirs of the agrarian civilization which began in Europe with the spread of farming practices during the Neolithic. Consequently, “farming” is a crucial topic in archaeological and historical research. The period between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic in the Atlantic Europe witnessed the introduction of farming and the development of new social and cultural communities associated to this new subsistence practice and the end of the previous and high density population of hunter-gatherers. One of the traits traditionally associated with the transition to farming in Europe is the introduction of pottery technology, using it as proxy for the shift to the new subsistence practices. However, the role of pottery in the transition to farming is unclear. In other parts of the world, there are examples of both pre-farming pottery production and aceramic farming analysis. Currently, the application of organic residue analysis allows understanding the use and function of pottery and linking this technology to farming. Few studies, however, have investigated the role of pottery technology in the Southwest of the coast of Europe. CerAM project addressed this challenge though the application of the latest chemical and molecular analysis. The design of our project comprised the study of several pottery assemblages along the Atlantic coast of South Europe from Portugal to Normandy (Figure 1 and 2). CerAM aims to reconstruct the use of pottery during this key transition in this geographical region and to test the hypothesis that the earliest pots in this region were used for processing domesticated resources. To address these research questions, CerAM established four main objectives: i) to complete the first survey of the use of early pottery in this region by chemical and microscopic analysis of food residues; ii) Assess whether pot contents reflect the shift in subsistence strategy observed in the stable isotope of archaeological human record in this area or whether this region also experienced a similar transition in subsistence strategy to that observed in on the North Atlantic coast; iii) To determine whether variability in the use of different vessels within an assemblage corresponds to differences in shape, size, decoration, manufacturing technique or depositional context; and iv) establish the regional context for the transmission process of pottery technology on the western European coast.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз