Late Glacial Ceramic Innovation and Symbolism from the Balkans in its Wider Context

Abstract

Abstract Ceramic technologies are widely associated with Holocene-aged archaeological technocomplexes, and the term ‘ceramic’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘pottery’. However, thousands of ceramic artefacts excavated from early Gravettian (‘Pavlovian’) sites in Czech Republic demonstrate that ceramic technologies are more than 30,000 years old. Moreover, these earliest iterations were used to make symbolic material culture, rather than functional pottery. The discovery of a large assemblage of ceramic figurines in late Palaeolithic contexts at Vela Spila, Croatia, along with smaller, isolated ceramic assemblages from Eastern Europe and northern Africa, demonstrates the wide geographic scope of Palaeolithic symbolic ceramics. This chapter compares the ceramic records from Croatia to those found elsewhere in Eurasia, with special focus on the Pavlovian figurines. We consider both the technologies of production and the aesthetics of the ‘finished’ artefacts. Can these two geographically and chronologically disparate iterations be interpreted as the result of cultural continuity? What are the implications of these assemblages for our broader understanding of the scope of Upper Palaeolithic artistic and technological repertoires across Europe?