Beyond centralisation? Reassessing pottery production in Iron Age Emilia-Romagna

• In Iron Age Italy, urban workshops did not always correspond to regional concentration. • Period 2 evidence is distributed across a substantially broader range of sites. • Subsampling confirms that this pattern is not driven by unequal sample size. • Urban and non-urban pottery production developed simultaneously. • Pre-Roman regional economies could have combined multiple productive arrangements. This paper examines the organisation of ceramic production in Iron Age Emilia-Romagna, with particular attention to the transformations associated with the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. During this period, the region witnessed the consolidation of major urban centres, the development of spatially articulated workshops, and the wider reorganisation of settlements and agricultural system across the Po Plain. Drawing on a regional dataset of production contexts, the study combines the archaeological character of the evidence with its territorial setting to assess changes in the concentration and distribution of documented pottery production through time. Descriptive analysis is integrated with concentration measures and sensitivity analyses to evaluate whether the observed patterns can be explained solely by differences in sample size or archaeological visibility. The paper argues that urban consolidation did not coincide with the disappearance of documented production outside the major centres. Instead, increasingly structured urban workshops developed within a broader and differentiated productive landscape. The sixth–fifth-century horizon is therefore interpreted not as a linear process of craft centralisation, but as a reorganisation of ceramic production at both urban and regional scale.