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Variability in clay processing recipes for pottery is still at a descriptive stage as far as prehistoric contexts are concerned. This paper intends to go beyond our traditional limits, based on the best-documented case for prehistory, the Bell Beaker style, which spread throughout the whole of Europe during the third millennium BC. The thousands of archaeometric analyses that have been carried out on the main concentrations from France, Spain and Portugal are taken into account in order to reconstruct the circulation mechanisms of the pottery and the social organization of the communities who used it.

We applied pyrolysis-GC/MS to archaeological potsherds from prehistoric settlements in north-west Spain, some of which are conspicuously black or exhibit a black inner core from incomplete burn-out. Virtually all pyrolysis products could be related to thermally modified material (partially polycondensed aromatics and short-chain alkyl moieties) that most probably formed during firing (as opposed to cooking). Principal component analysis and supporting evidence (elemental composition, colour parameters and SEM microscopy) showed that the firing conditions (redox conditions and firing intensity) control pyrolysate composition. Laboratory experiments are required to fully understand the pyrolysis fingerprints and sample pre-treatment might enhance the information obtained.

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