ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a more social, symbolic and agency-oriented history of the rich ceramic Pitted Ware Culture (PWC) traditions of the Middle Neolithic period in eastern Middle Sweden. In order to move away from these more established explanations of the PWC, it seems appropriate to develop more resolutely social and symbolic insights into the role of PWC as a system of material communication that was reproduced and transformed by the negotiated intervention of human agency. The argument here is that through socially embedded reproduction of the PWC ceramic craft, wider public meanings and interpretations were constantly negotiated and contested. Accordingly, there is no reason to label the PWC as a new people' or surviving hunter-gatherersthe PWC were humans with a history that developed out of the early Neolithic Funnel Beaker Culture (FBC). Knowingly, human agents used the past to connect with the future and used rituals to change the structure of society.
