Serial learners: interactions between Funnel Beaker West and Corded Ware communities in the Netherlands during the third millennium BCE from the perspective of ceramic technology

Abstract

5000 years ago, a migration shaped Europe’s future. Migrating communities spread across Europe within two centuries, leaving lasting changes in connectivity, language, and genetics. Yet these migrating communities did not enter an empty continent. Across Europe, they encountered indigenous communities with millennia-old roots. What interactions between migrating and indigenous communities drove the changes seen in the archaeological record? This dissertation sheds new light on this question with an innovative approach to ceramics. Ceramics bear traces of production techniques which potters learned and applied to create them. The approach outlined here can quantitatively assess the amount of shared knowledge between potters from these traces by combining the chaîne opératoire method with network analysis and probability theory. This approach is applied to ceramics from migrating Corded Ware communities and indigenous Funnel Beaker West communities in the Netherlands to detect whether potters in these communities interacted and shared knowledge. The outcomes offer a unique perspective on this period and prehistoric migrations in general. Migrating and indigenous communities are shown to co-exist for several centuries at the start of the third millennium BCE with evidence for migrant potters learning repeatedly from indigenous potters and incorporating this knowledge into the production of Corded Ware vessels.