Husking Trays in the Context of Neolithic Socialization. The Sensory Experience of ‘Bread’ Consumption

Olivier Nieuwenhuyse has shared with other scholars, including myself, the idea that pottery was part of the tool set that enabled communities to establish social networks and that the most symbolically charged pottery was that which was used in commensality events. Much of his most recent research has been devoted to demonstrate this idea through a systematic scientific analysis of Late Neolithic pottery from Northern Mesopotamia and the Levant. He also argued that in order to investigate the meaning and symbolism conveyed by pots, one must concentrate on sensory experiences made possible by the pots (‘Pots to be seen’, ‘See or touch?’) (Nieuwenhuyse 2017a; 2019). In this paper I would like to contribute to this argument for investigating the multi-sensory experience of Late Neolithic communities (Nieuwenhuyse 2019) through the investigation of husking trays, which I propose were used to bake symbolically charged ‘bread’, the shared consumption of which contributed to the maintenance and regulation of social relations (Balossi Restelli 2021).