ABSTRACT
This chapter presents preliminary analysis of 1,185 published radiocarbon dates from 82 sites associated with early pottery technology from across the Old World. The results enable provisional mapping of potential early pottery dispersal routes and the full dataset. The invention and dispersal of ceramic vessel technology has become the focus of significant academic attention in recent years, and improvements in 14C measurement techniques have allowed archaeologists to push back the oldest pottery dates by many thousands of years. For each date, the features recorded were: the name of the site, stratigraphic details, the material dated, uncalibrated radiocarbon date bp, cultural associations and source reference. Many dates were published with associated grid references and most other site locations could be found elsewhere in the literature. This strategy enabled a larger number of sites to be included in the map and database, and deemed acceptable given the requirement to identify very large-scale and coarse-grained patterning in the chronology of early pottery dispersals.
