What are large-scale Archaeometric programmes for? Bell beaker pottery and societies from the third millennium BC in Western Europe

摘要

Variability in clay processing recipes for pottery is still at a descriptive stage as far as prehistoric contexts are concerned. This paper intends to go beyond our traditional limits, based on the best-documented case for prehistory, the Bell Beaker style, which spread throughout the whole of Europe during the third millennium bc. The thousands of archaeometric analyses that have been carried out on the main concentrations from France, Spain and Portugal are taken into account in order to reconstruct the circulation mechanisms of the pottery and the social organization of the communities who used it.