Dating the spread of pottery among hunter-gatherer-fisher communities (ERC project)

Dr. John Meadows, Dr. Elena Nikulina, Dr. Harald Lübke, Dr. Ulrich Schmölcke

Pottery first appeared in the Baltic region among hunter-gatherer-fisher communities, and was apparently derived from earlier pottery production among hunter-gatherer-fishers further east, rather than from Neolithic farming communities to the south. One of the main challenges in trying to understand this process in more detail is that the absolute chronology of early pottery in European Russia and surrounding countries is deeply unsatisfactory, for a number of reasons:

the dating of some of the most important sites is based on small numbers of conventional radiocarbon measurements, with large uncertainties, on materials that are either unsuitable for precise dating (e.g. bulk sediment) or whose chronological relationship to pottery is debatable

• the most precise dates for early pottery are AMS radiocarbon results for food-crust samples, which may be subject to unquantifiable reservoir effects (see Fishy Food Crusts project); moreover, food crusts are not necessarily found on the earliest pottery types and may not occur on typologically diagnostic pottery
• there has been no systematic attempt to integrate relative dating (based on stratigraphy and typological development) with calibrated radiocarbon results
• discussion has inevitably focussed on a small number of apparently very early radiocarbon dates, which have not been replicated and for which no quality control criteria are recognised.