Cardial, or Cardium pottery, Culture

Cardium Pottery or Cardial Ware is a Neolithic decorative style that gets its name from the imprinting of the clay with the shell of the Cardium edulis, a marine mollusk.

These forms of pottery are in turn used to define the Neolithic culture which produced and spread them, mostly commonly called the "Cardial Culture".The alternative name Impressed Ware is given by some archaeologists to define this culture, because impressions can be with sharp objects other than Cardium shell, such as a nail or comb.

Impressed pottery is much more widespread than the Cardial.

Impressa is found in the zone "covering Italy to the Ligurian coast" as distinct from the more western Cardial beginning in Provence, France and extending to western Portugal.

The sequence in Western Europe has traditionally been supposed to start with widespread Cardial Ware, and then to develop other methods of impression locally, termed "epi-Cardial".

However the widespread Cardial and Impressa pattern types overlap and are now considered more likely to be contemporary.This pottery style gives its name to the main culture of the Mediterranean Neolithic: Cardium Pottery Culture or Cardial Culture, or Impressed Ware Culture, which eventually extendd from the Adriatic sea to the Atlantic coasts of Portugal and south to Morocco.