Things we lost in the fire: The case of the “beautiful” vessel

From the earliest excavations on the territory of the central Balkans and up to today, Late Neolithic pottery assemblages have remained one of the most important contributors to our knowledge of the past. To a certain extent, the burned Late Neolithic horizons left a great number of the architectural details preserved in the archaeological record, along with various artefacts, of which pottery makes up the largest part. However, due to the fact that the majority of pottery vessels and sherds were subjected to temperatures that were higher than those they were initially fired in the manufacturing process, decoration makes up a minority of the archaeological record of the central Balkans and, unfortunately, we usually deal with plain assemblages. Therefore, it is not surprising that the discovery of one vessel that has a small preserved portion of applied painted decoration, unearthed from a burned building structure in the latest horizon at the site of Plocnik, introduced a whole new set of questions. Importantly, this instance further emphasises that when deconstructing prehistoric paradigms, our interpretation sometimes must go beyond observation.