Crete between the late FN and MM II (c.3600-1750/00 BC; for chronology see Tomkins 2007b; Manning 2010).

No abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, excavations beneath Bronze Age strata at Dimini and Sesklo in Thessaly and Knossos on Crete revealed an earlier epoch of human occupation, characterized by stone tools, handmade pottery, and the bones of domesticated animals ( Evans 1901 ;Tsountas 1908 ). Termed Neolithic by analogy with other European regions, it was immediately clear that this was a phase of village-dwelling farmers, the Aegean's fi rst agricultural society. An Imagined NeolithicIn these early years and under the infl uence of nationalist and colonialist agendas, a line was drawn in the sand of prehistory separating the more familiar, village-dwelling, sedentary, pottery-using farmers of the Neolithic and Bronze Age from the more alien, cave-dwelling, mobile foragers of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic ( Zvelebil 1995 ). In what has become a modern origin myth for Western society, the development of agriculture and sedentism was viewed as 'an escape from the impasse of savagery' ( Childe 1942 , 55 )-a revolutionary beginning in the development of modernity, albeit one eclipsed in modern signifi cance by the 'urban revolution' and the 'emergence of civilization' in the Bronze Age ( Childe 1942 , 79-163 ;1950;Renfrew 1972 ). To modern eyes accustomed to almost constant change, the nearly constant continuity of the Neolithic seemed backward or uninteresting.

This article focuses on the importance of ceramics in material cultural studies. It proceeds to say that ceramics are considered a key feature of human material culture because of what they are taken to represent in economic, technological, and evolutionary terms. The innovation of taking the plastic medium of clay and marrying it with pyrotechnology to create irreversibly a resilient object — usually in the form of a container, has frequently been assumed to mark a revolutionary stage in the development of modern human thought and practice, forming with agriculture and sedentism a trinity of epoch-changing innovations. This article talks about the idea of the body as being used as a container. It says that ‘Containment’ may well be the ‘function’ offering archaeology one of the most important sources of archaeological data and windows into society, and culture; but very little is known about the cognitive, experiential, and evolutionary grounding of the concepts embodied in each and every container.