ABSTRACT
The so-called early medieval period has been much discussed at the historical level, especially on the basis of written sources, particularly epigraphic ones. There have been many debates about the organisation of society during this period. However, until recently, archaeology and the analysis of material culture, other than sculpture, only served to support the hypotheses established on the basis of those written sources. B.D. Chattopadhyaya, by proposing an urbanistic model opposite to that of R.S. Sharma, has brought the question of archaeological sources back to the centre of the debate, as the publication of this book demonstrates. Amongst the most abundant finds on an excavation site, there is pottery, a direct witness of human activity but of which study has unfortunately often been neglected. This chapter therefore proposes a synthesis of the different ceramic corpus discovered on the sites of the ‘early medieval’ period in ancient Bengal in order to define if common characteristics can be identified and what are the significance of the observed variations.
