The introduction and spread of the earliest pottery in Britain through the compound-specific radiocarbon dating of organic residues in pottery

This thesis investigates the transition to the Neolithic in Britain, a period of fundamental change in the ways people lived and interacted with the world, which took place at the start of the 4th millennium BC. This change encompassed not only a shift from hunting and gathering to farming but also the appearance of timber halls and houses, stone and earthen monuments and the making and use of pottery. Multiple models have been proposed to explain how this transition took place, and although it has been shown that large-scale movement of farmers from the Continent was the driving force behind the transition over the long term, this obscures the complexities of the archaeological evidence from this period and any smaller scale processes of mobility and migration that may have occurred. A more nuanced narrative is called for, as is the construction of a precise and robust chronological framework upon which these narratives can be built. This thesis aims to unpick the chronology of the transition to the Neolithic in Britain through the direct dating of pottery, one of the most commonly found artefacts at early Neolithic sites. Using a novel methodology, 40 new compound-specific radiocarbon dates were obtained on fatty acids preserved in early Neolithic ceramic vessels from across Britain. These residues were obtained through the extraction of lipids from over 600 early Neolithic vessels, nearly doubling the existing number and extending the geographical spread of Neolithic organic residue analysis in Britain. This therefore enabled the simultaneous examination of the timing, role and function of the earliest pottery in Britain, across different regions and phases of the early Neolithic. The new radiocarbon dates were incorporated into Bayesian models to investigate the timings of the appearance and spread of the earliest pottery in Britain, and the chronology of the transition to the Neolithic. This thesis shows that pottery first appeared in Britain in the 40th and 39th centuries cal BC, first in Wessex and the south-east of England before spreading north and westwards. The earliest pottery, which was found across Britain, was Carinated Bowl pottery and was shown to be relatively uniform in both form and function. The major new corpus of dietary data from analysis of absorbed lipid residues in pottery showed that Carinated Bowl pottery was predominantly used to process dairy products, indicating the importance of dairying to early Neolithic communities in Britain. It was only in the 38th century BC, once pottery and other Neolithic things and practices had reached most of Britain, that new pottery styles emerged and the functions of pottery began to change, at least in southern Britain. This suggests the transition to the Neolithic in Britain was the result of small-scale migration of Continental farmers and the integration of some indigenous hunter-gathers, which formed the earliest farming communities in Britain and paved the way for much larger scale migration in 38th century BC.