CETRAWEM · LOST AND SURVIVED CERAMIC TRADITIONS IN THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN: The Sardinian Case

Material culture is actively used to establish, and maintain boundaries. From time to time social or political differences result in material and technological differences. The understanding of the variable relationships between material culture and social boundaries contributes to a broader anthropological and theoretical understanding of material culture as part of society and the comprehension of past socio-economical systems can lead to a better undersanding of the actual reality. The Western Mediterranean has played an important role in a crucial moment of transformation in the Mediterranean World. During this exact moment a progressive change from the “world socio-economic system” into a “close or regional socio-economic system” occurred. The study of the Late Roman Coarse Wares (LRCW's) is essential to understand these changes. However, LRCW's had not been intensively studied and the existing results raise lots of new questions and problems to deal with, regarding not only to the production and consumption patterns during Late Antiquity, but also some aspects of the theoretical fundaments of provenance. Our proposal involves a complete archaeological archaeometrical, ethnoarchaeological and ethnoarchaeometrical characterisation of LRCW's, taking as a sudy case Sardinia, an exhaustive study of raw materials, identification their technological characteristics and an extended study of their techno-functional sufficiency. This proposal, finally, aims to create a holistic methodological approach which could be applied by other specialists in the future in similar studies, also to propose a complete and standardised methodology for raw material study introducing new approaches and to construct a Digital Geological Information System (Geo-GIS), which will provide all the necessary information on raw materials and possible sources for LRCW's in the Western Mediterranean. At last, our project also aims to generate a complete digital data base.