Losing Your Mind Over a Pot of Clay – La Hoguette: The Pottery That Refuses to Behave

Since its definition in the late 1980s, the incised, pointed-based, and often bone-tempered La Hoguette pottery has been central to discussions of the origins of Early Western European pottery. This unique type of pottery appears around 5,500 BC on the western fringes of the earliest Linearbandkeramik (LBK) culture, the first farmers of the area. However, the nature of La Hoguette remains uncertain: it could be a late Mesolithic culture, a phenomenon, or simply a special type of LBK pottery. While extensive efforts have been made to define La Hoguette as a distinct culture, there has been a lack of comprehensive comparison between La Hoguette pottery and the LBK pottery tradition, despite most La Hoguette finds being made in LBK settlements. Recent archaeological and geochemical studies using portable X-ray fluorescence (p-XRF) now address this research gap. This presentation will discuss what it would mean for our understanding and interpretation of the Early Western Neolithic if La Hoguette and LBK pottery were not as different as previously thought.