Presented by Peter Tomkins, and Brecht Lambrechts
In track Posters

Over the last four decades the idea that Neolithic communities were static, homogenous, isolated entities, preoccupied with producing the subsistence that would ensure their own survival, has been replaced by an emerging picture of dynamic, diverse and developing communities, for whom interaction, of various forms, scales and intensities, played a fundamental role. Initially this new picture was driven by advances in the theoretical modelling of small-scale farming communities and the recognition that the distribution of certain raw materials, such as obsidian, mapped out extensive zones of procurement and transportation. Clearly the Neolithic Aegean was always a connected place. But how did connections between communities and across landscapes actually play out at the local and regional level. How did these patterns vary in time and space? How might we gain a sense of changing directionalities and intensities in such relations?
Until relatively recently, the role played by pottery in interactions between communities was less clear or closely defined, owing to an array of conceptual, methodological and empirical issues. However, over the last two decades it has become clear that highly detailed, fully integrated, contextual characterisation of Neolithic ceramic assemblages, in which a wide variety of attribute date is collected and related (e.g. fabric, forming, finishing, firing, morphology, use-wear, taphonomy etc.), has the potential to open up detailed windows on the actual connections that existed between people in space and thereby provides a rich body of data to explore different patterns of interaction and changing constructions of community and landscape in time and space. In order to illustrate this, the paper will present several case-studies drawn from research conducted on EN-FN ‘cerami-scapes’ on the islands of Crete and Chios.