When my son Noah was seven years old, he did a show-and-tell project at school. This involved taking in a few of his favourite things and telling the class about them. Along with the Spiderman figure, family photo and book, the star attraction of his presentation was, as he put it ‘a real copy of a sabre-toothed tiger tooth’. What did he mean by ‘real copy’? He knew that it was not original, but in his imagination he saw it as real. It was as close to the tiger as he could get. By all accounts the class were most impressed by the tooth. I like to imagine the oohs and aahs as this most exotic of imitations was brought out of Noah's bag.

This anecdote is about mimesis – the relationship between original and Reproduction – which has long been understood as fundamental to discussions of creativity. It provides a means of understanding the move from the existing to the new since creativity does not emerge in a vacuum but is based upon existing knowledge (Pope 2005). Only through understanding this relationship is it possible to identify novelty and what constitutes creativity. The concept of mimesis has a role in understanding visual art, aesthetics, literature, language, music and theatre and has more recently informed research in psychology, education, post-colonial studies, political theory, biology and anthropology (Potolsky 2006). In archaeology, however, mimesis has only relatively recently begun to be overtly explored, although it has long had an implicit role in understanding material culture.

In this essay, I want to look at a range of different approaches to mimesis and their implications for exploring creativity in archaeology. My case study focuses on ceramics from the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age site of Vukovar Lijeva Bara in east Croatia.