Changing Clays: Raw Material Preferences in the ‘Neolithic’ Ceramic Assemblages of the Upper Vitim Basin

© The Prehistoric Society 2017 This paper provides a contextual summary of a diachronic analysis of ceramic vessels and hunter-gatherer societies from the final Pleistocene to the later Holocene in a remote corner of the Vitim Basin in Eastern Siberia. An integrated programme of ceramic analysis, raw materials survey, and archaeological investigation is drawn into new models of group mobility and social behaviour. The results challenge widespread assumptions about the relationship between ceramics, sedentarisation, and social complexity. Evidence of these transformations, though potentially identifiable in the archaeological record, could not be associated with the adoption of pottery.