Regional variation in the use of earliest pottery in North-western Europe : Organic residue analysis of Swifterbant pottery (5000 - 4000 cal. BC)

This thesis aims to investigate the function and functional variation of ceramic vessels of Swifterbant culture (c. 5000-4000/3400 cal BC) in the Dutch Wetlands through the application of lipid residue analysis. It is the first systematic application of this method to Swifterbant pottery. In addition, having gained access to numerous assemblages, it is also the first large-scale study of Swifterbant pottery. Swifterbant culture is a hunter-gatherer-fisher society with pottery which demonstrates a continuation of hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies alongside a gradual shift towards agricultural cultivation and domestic food production. Whilst the earliest Swifterbant pottery is dated to c. 5000 cal BC, the arrival of domesticated animals is dated to c. 4500 cal BC and cereals at c. 4300 cal BC. Here, lipid residue analysis was applied to 148 samples, representing 146 individual vessels recovered from eight archaeological sites: Swifterbant type sites S2, S3 and S4 (c. 4300-4000 cal BC) in Flevoland, the Netherlands; Polderweg, De Bruin, Brandwijk, and Hazendonk (c. 5000-3800 cal BC) in the Lower Rhine-Meuse area, the Netherlands; and finally Hüde I (4700-3500 cal BC) in the Lower Saxony. Overall, the new data generated for this thesis shows that Swifterbant pottery has been continuously and primarily used for processing of aquatic resources, almost exclusively freshwater fish despite its highly diversified subsistence strategies, which include large and small game animals, terrestrial and aquatic food resources. The results also present temporal changes in the exploitation of food resources in the Lower Rhine-Meuse area where we see pottery being also used to process different ranges of foodstuffs such as terrestrial resources and dairy products. The identification of dairy residue is the first direct evidence so far from Swifterbant pottery. Overall, this study shows that the motivation for the uptake of pottery into the Swifterbant culture did not necessarily related to changing subsistence strategies as we see a clear continuity in culinary traditions after the introduction of domesticates into the Swifterbant culture.