Across Technologies: what is left to explore in the concept of technological variability? Choices, traditions, identities and ideologies in prehistoric pottery production in Europe and the Mediterranean

This workshop brings together scholars of diverse specialisms focusing on ceramic production and technology to discuss how new approaches in archaeometry and ceramic analysis can be marshalled towards new research frameworks in Europe and the Mediterranean throughout late Prehistory (VI-II mill. BC). The aim is to explore and compare production modes and technological traditions within and across societies, regions, and periods.

Ceramics are a key technology associated with increasing socio-economic complexity in European prehistory. Despite their ubiquity in the archaeological record and scholarly agreement on their importance, the potential of ceramic data to comprehensively address region-level socio-economic questions about past communities has not been fully realised.

Research has focused on the dissemination of ceramic technology with rather less attention paid to the diversity of productive strategies across time and space and their implications. Alongside major innovations, small-scale variations in technological choices and productive strategies might hint at different requirements, uses, traditions, interactions and identities within or across communities. A multiscalar approach to ceramics aimed at a better understanding the range of production modes, technologies and styles, can unlock new lines of socio-economic enquiry.

Topics considered include (but are not limited to):

1) The relationship of geography and technological choice to style, context (i.e domestic/funerary/ritual), and social identity.

2) Conservatism and innovation in technological traditions and their meaning.

3) The concept of technological variability and its role in mobility and the exchange of objects and ideas.

AcrossTech - preliminary programme

Case studies and approaches by invited speakers

Keynote lecture by Prof. Stephen Shennan, University College London

Followed by round table and discussion