Moments in the biography of the Neolithic vessels of Vădastra tradition at the Lower Danube

With few exceptions, many earlier and more recent approaches to Neolithic ceramics in Romania have unfortunately been informed by the modernist dichotomies between the sacred and the profane, the functional and the symbolic, something that became the subject of much criticism in postprocessual archaeologies as of the 1980s. In contrast with a modernist perspective, in this text I have chosen to apply a biographical approach, which, in my opinion, has the merit of unifying all of the aspects – technological, functional, symbolic, etc. – that until now have been treated distinctly. The subject of this article is a series of Neolithic vessels attributed to the Vădastra tradition of southern Romania and north-western Bulgaria dated to ca. 5200– 4900 BC. With the exception of one vessel from Slatina, two vessels from Hotărani and two so-called Vădastra-type “ imports” from Hungary, all of the vessels discussed here originate from the Vădastra – Măgura Fetelor/ Dealul Cișmelei settlement located in southern Oltenia, Romania. While Neolithic ceramics from Vădastra as a whole have already been the subject of a previous biographical study, on this occasion the analysis takes place at the level of the individual objects. While in no way claiming to have provided complete biographies or to have exhausted the repertoire of existing and possible biographies, the examples discussed here are illustrative of a series of key moments in the biography of the Vădastra vessels and thus help us achieve a better understanding of the relationships between prehistoric and modern peoples, on the one hand, and Neolithic vessels, on the other.