I started this book by arguing for the study of the ‘unstudiable’ notion of creativity in archaeology. Yet, as the poet Joseph Brodsky put it, ‘In the business of writing, what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties’ (1986: 17). It is in the recognition of what is not well understood, as well as what is known, that archaeology moves forward. While I hope that I have shown that the complex and nuanced concept of creativity can be explored in the Bronze Age, creativity is not a finite notion. Hence no discussion of creativity can ever be complete. There are other themes that I could have chosen to explore within this book and other case studies that I might have used as examples. In writing this volume I have necessarily been selective in my choices and have aimed to discuss a range of different creative practices in order to convey the breadth of creativity in clay in the Bronze Age in the Carpathian Basin. It would therefore be wrong to end with some kind of ostentatious statement about what creativity ‘is’ or ‘is not’. Rather than attempt a global understanding or model of creativity, my ambitions have been more modest. Through explorations of the particular ways that people acted in making and using clay objects, I have aimed to expose understandings of creativity as both process and outcome. I have tried to open up new questions and to offer a fresh series of understandings of the potentials of prehistoric clay objects to the reader. Throughout I have stressed that creativity is a cultural and material phenomenon. Consequently I have taken an unashamedly contextual direction in its investigation. I have focussed on independent individual case studies with different data sets and on a single material.

I did not go to the Carpathian Basin to hunt down particular predetermined ‘types’ of creativity. Instead the themes explored within this book took shape around the material that I have had the great privilege to study over several years.