A multi-proxy approach to pottery function in Early and Middle Neolithic sites of Sardinia (Italy)

In many archaeological contexts, pottery sherds are often the only visible remnants of complex technical systems that ensured the management of natural resources and their transformation into culturally defined foods or products. Depending on its physical properties (porosity, hardness), pottery can preserve multiple levels of information, reflecting both the anticipated needs of human groups, translated into morphometrical choices in the vessel fashioning phase, and the actual use-behaviour, recorded as use-alteration traces at different scales, on the surfaces and into the pottery walls : attritions, visible and absorbed residues, and their molecular constituents. The interdisciplinary analysis of these different proxies provides an efficient methodological path towards a deeper knowledge of the activities in which pottery was involved. Conjointly, contextual and spatial data about pottery disposal and abandonment in different types of sites (caves, open-air sites, household settlements and funerary sites) are crucial to evaluate the organisation of activities and the selection of vessels morphotypes for various functional needs. Grounded on these methodological premises, we investigate pottery assemblages from several sites dated back to VI and V millennium cal BC in Sardinia (Italy), an insular region localised in the middle of Western Mediterranean. The aim of this work is to identify possible lines of continuity and the main points of change in the use of pottery, from the initial stage of colonisation and adaptation of the first Neolithic groups in the island, and along the phases of gradual development of agriculture and animal husbandry. Besides vessel morphotypology and morphometry, all the use-related traces are considered, through macroscopic and low magnification microscopic use-wear analysis, biomolecular and compound-specific isotopic analysis of organic residues by GC-FID, GC-MS and GC-C-IRMS. Preliminary results of this study provide the first assessment of the functional categorisation of pottery used by the Early Neolithic groups in the island, apparently guided mainly by storage needs, with rare evidence of the use of cooking pots, though identified in the Cardial phase. Overall, a diverging role of pottery in storing systems and cooking practices emerges between Early and Middle Neolithic, with an increasing integration of vessels into direct thermic processing of products mostly from the half of the V millennium cal BC, parallelly to a broader spread of farming and ruminant husbandry.