Since the emergence of the earliest ceramic vessels in the dawn of the Neolithic, they have become one of the key artefacts of both prehistoric and historical cultures.

The pottery appears, at the start, to meet specific daily needs and, because of them, certain shapes and sizes of containers appear. But it does not solely satisfy basic consumption needs since the ceramic vessels are also within the framework of the mechanisms of production, storage, trade and play a social role to serve certain ideological and ritual purposes, such as special events, of social prestige, and magic-religious or funerary manifestations.

The jars, both in its formal and stylistic aspects, are products of aesthetic tastes and traditions specific to certain groups or individuals. However, one vessel may also have different functions, so it will really be the archaeological context in which they are located the key that will bring us the true function it had for those groups that produced and/or used them.

As a well-preserved perishable material, they have come to play a major role in archaeological studies, especially in the stages at which the stone loses its hegemony in the manufacture of tools. This has led us to consider the presence of certain vessels as a differentiating factor of cultures and peoples, and some historiographic trends even consider that certain changes in the pottery traditions are the result of the arrival of new settlers to the area.

For a better exposure of the research on the characteristics that pottery vessels display and their relation to the context, and given the wide time frame that they may include (from Prehistory to the present), this thematic section will be further divided into several sections.

Firstly, the sections outlined below are expected, which does not prevent that, as participants make their proposals of communication, they are enlarged.

E.1. Ceramics in Prehistory

E.2. Ceramics in Protohistory

E.3. Ceramics in Classical Antiquity

E.4. Ceramics in Late Antiquity

E.5. Christian Medieval and Muslim Ceramics / Modern Ceramics