Saturday 15 May, Canterbury
While chronology is a key reason why we study pottery it is not the sole purpose and as our Research Agenda states the analysis of pottery can be used to understand a great many things about the lifeways of past societies.
The purpose of this meeting will be to examine how pottery is currently used to understand chronology – from new beginnings, the tempo and nature of development and change, and the how, when and why of any geographical spread (understanding potscapes) – the potential of new scientific approaches, opportunities and new directions will be explored. One approach that is already having an influence on existing pottery typo-chronologies is the increasing use of the Bayesian Modelling of radiocarbon dates to produce more precise dating of sites and ceramic sequences. In turn this may force us to look afresh at how pottery styles developed and may encourage new analysis and characterisation. Developer-funded archaeology, community and research-lead projects are constantly providing important new opportunities for pottery studies. But at the same time there is still much potential in revisiting the many important research archives. Identifying and unlocking the potential of material that sits within the many archaeological stores has always been a goal of the PCRG.
Programme and further information can be viewed here
