Early pottery mobility: The case of early Neolithic Thessaly, Greece Anastasia Dimoula Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Faculty of Philosophy, School of History and Archaeology, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece article info Article history: Received 23 June 2016 Received in revised form 30 December 2016 Accepted 7 January 2017 Available online xxxx 1. Introduction The earliest ceramic vessels in Greece have been identified in ar- chaeological layers dated to the initial Neolithic, i.e. the mid-7th millen- nium BCE, in a series of Neolithic sites in Thessaly (Reingruber, 2008) in central-northern Greece, in the cave of Franchthi in the Peloponnese (Vitelli, 1993b) and in Knossos in Crete (Tomkins and Day, 2001; Tomkins et al., 2004). Recent archaeological field research in northern Greece, and particularly in the region of Macedonia, has brought to light a new series of early Neolithic sites which have yielded dated and contextualized early pottery, currently analysed (Kotsakis, 2014; Maniatis, 2014; Dimoula, in press; Saridaki et al., in press)(Fig. 1). The presence of baked clay masses or even ceramic sherds in Paleo- lithic or Mesolithic contexts indicate that ceramic materials were not unknown to the earlier inhabitants of Greece (Galanidou and Perlès, 2003). However, in the subsequent early Neolithic period pottery ap- pears as a fully developed craft, characterized by effective technological choices in all stages of manufacture (Vitelli, 1995). Moreover, there is a complete lack of evidence related to possible experimentations with this innovative then technique. This has led to the assumption that pot- tery technology was part of the so-called ‘Neolithic package’, an accu- mulation of materials, techniques and knowledge, believed to have transferred from the Near East to the Aegean and the Balkans through demic or cultural diffusion (Ammerman and Biagi, 2003). In this con- text, the common morphological characteristics of pots throughout broad geographic regions are considered as evidence of such processes (Brami and Heyd, 2011). As a result, research on the early pottery in Greece has been limited in the theoretical and methodological confines of the investigation of its indigenous or not character, which was directly supported by ceramic provenance studies (see Dimoula, 2014: 19–23). Nonetheless, current theoretical reasoning has moved beyond such simplistic or generic Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 12 (2017) 209–218 E-mail address: adimoula@hist.auth.gr. schemas in understanding cultural phenomena and interpreting social change and has argued that human or social actions comprise complex- ities that require refined approaches and methodologies in order to be deciphered through material culture (Hodder, 2012; Dobres, 2010). Much less when approaching the material expressions of societies ac- tive in the culturally fluid landscape of the eastern Mediterranean dur- ing the 7th millennium BCE (Kotsakis, 2005, 2006, 2008). In this context, the aim of the study presented in this paper was to re-approach and re-interpret the early Neolithic ceramic assemblages retrieved from a series of sites located in the geographical environment of Thessaly (Dimoula, 2014: 35–38). Most of them are regarded as representing the earliest ceramic vessels in the Aegean, supported by radiocarbon dates (Reingruber and Thissen, 2005; Reingruber, 2009; Facorellis, in press)(Table 1). By implementing the combination of mac- roscopic examination of pottery and ceramic petrography analysis, the scope of the study was to view this material both on the micro-scale, in- vestigating technological choices throughout pottery production (Gauss and Kiriatzi, 2011), and on the macro-scale, in an attempt to infer on the multifaceted interactions of humans or societies with the environment (Ingold, 2000), on the potential communications between people among sites and regions, as a result of the mobility of people, ideas and primarily artefacts, such as the pots (Knappett, 2011; Broodbank and Kiriatzi, 2014). 2. Materials and methods The region of Thessaly was designated as a case study, firstly because it has for long been considered as the ‘cradle’ of the Neolithic in Greece, since some of the earliest in date sites in the Aegean are located there (Theocharis, 1973; Papathanassopoulos, 1996). Secondly, it comprises a well-defined extended lowland geographical landscape, with massifs surrounding two large alluvial basins, where Neolithic activity appears to have been concentrated quite densely. These basins, the eastern and western Thessalian plains, are divided by a series of hills, and are drained by a large river, Peneus, and its tributaries, while there is only one opening to the sea, in the area of the Pagasetic Gulf (Fig. 2). The pottery assemblages selected for study belong to seven sites. The principal criterion in their selection was the representation of early ceram- ic assemblages in their archaeological deposits, as defined by the strati- graphic contexts and the typological characteristics of finds, but mainly by radiocarbon dating (Dimoula, 2014: 61–62). These sites are (Fig. 2, Table 1): the cave of Theopetra, located in the northwestern edge of the Thessalian plain, where the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic is represented (Kyparissi-Apostolika, 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2003); Sesklo in http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2017.01.008 2352-409X/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jasrep