Prehistoric Ceramics Research Group: Occasinoal Paper 5In October 2004 over 70 delegates met in the Department of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bradford for the second International Conference on Prehistoric Ceramics. The conference was the second major biannual conference to be organised by the Prehistoric Ceramics Research Group. The call for papers was deliberately broad in its scope - recent research - and such is the amount of work currently taking place on Prehistoric Ceramics across Europe (and indeed further afield) that the conference organisers were inundated with offers of papers. In such a developing subject as is modern ceramic studies, it is logical to assume that papers will be wide-ranging and varied. It is hoped that in the papers presented in this volume, readers will find much to stimulate the mind and their own directions of study even if the subject matter is not directly relevant to their own specific fields. This is the unifying beauty of ceramic research.