Understanding the (Early) Pottery Neolithic chipped stone production in north-western Aegean from the eastern Aegean perspective

This paper aims to outline the major points and current issues in understanding the chipped stone production in the Aegean areaduring the 7th millennium BC. Not often, western and eastern Aegean have been studied within the same framework, althoughsimilar trends related to the process of Neolithisation in this broad area, i.e., the Aegean basin, could be proposed. Some of themajor issues may relate to the unsynchronized chronology, which can be the first obstacle when it comes to the correlation of theNeolithic developments between Greece and the Aegean islands on one side and western Turkey on the other side. First-handstudies of lithic assemblages from the centre of the Aegean Anatolian coast will be used here to address shared features with thenorthern Greek Early Pottery Neolithic and to offer insights related to possibly different cultural backgrounds which could haveenabled and shaped different patterns of production and use of lithics. This study employs the analyses of raw materials used inthe production of chipped stone assemblages and their technological and typological features to gauge the north-western Aegeancontext from the eastern Aegean perspective