For more than a decade I have had the privilege of working in Hungary at the Bronze Age tell settlement of Százhalombatta. I had become fascinated by the particular complexity and diversity of Bronze Age ceramics in the Carpathian Basin. I wanted to explore not only the nature of this diversity, but also the human practices and motivations that lay behind it. The HERA-funded project Creativity and Craft Production in Middle and Late Bronze Age Europe (CinBA), which I led from 2010 to 2013 (grant number 09-HERA-JRP-CI-FP-020) (www.cinba.net), offered an opportunity to understand these in new ways through the lens of creativity. The project brought together colleagues from the Universities of Southampton, Cambridge and Trondheim, the National Museum of Denmark, the Natural History Museum in Vienna, the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, the Crafts Council and Sagnlandet, Lejre. It aimed to explore the fundamental nature of creativity in a critical period of human history by looking at developments in crafts that we take for granted today: pottery, textiles and metalwork. This volume is the fruit of that project.

Addressing creativity in the archaeological record has been both challenging and enjoyable. The intellectual, methodological and interpretive provocations that it offers have gone far beyond what I had anticipated. As a result it has been incredibly rich and stimulating, and has sparked many new ideas and collaborations. Although CinBA is now at an end, my own creative journey is just beginning.

It has been a joy and a privilege to work with all the colleagues involved in CinBA. I greatly value our discussions and friendship. This book could not have been written without the generosity of many archaeologists in the countries of the Carpathian Basin who kindly showed me material, answered queries and provided me with literature.