Protohistoric Italian ceramics: towards a general fabrics classification and interpretation

This is the first synthetic and comparative presentation of the petrographic classification of Bronze Age and Early Iron Age pottery as result of the interdisciplinary project Wikipottery performed by our team over the last 30 years. We analyzed collections from the Central Mediterranean and designed a specific database to store, standardize, classify and share the data. We show here the results from 88 archaeological sites and 1654 samples classified into 169 fabrics: technological compositions that identify the petrographic signatures of individual production centres/workshops/ individuals. These rigorous compositional formulae are conceptually on the same level as the morphological types defined by quantitative approaches. We present this general experiment and discuss the relevance of ceramic technological/compositional data for the reconstruction of environment, circulation, cultural identity, complexity and innovation in ancient societies.