Most of the research documented above was done mostly on a site and not on a regional scale. However, in 1964 John Sutton attempted a regional synthesis of Neolithic pottery by reclassifying the pottery hitherto known into three categories: A, B, and C. Class A was Elmenteitan pottery, which was confined to the sites of Gambles cave II, the Njoro River Cave, the Naivasha Railway rock shelter, and Long’s Drift. Class B comprised the Gumban A and Hyrax Hill pottery while all the roulette-decorated pottery, some of which belonged to Gumban B and Lanet ware, was grouped as class C. Class A was considered to be the oldest, and Sutton believed it had been made and/or used by hunter-gatherer communities. Class C on the other hand was the youngest and was believed to have been associated with iron-using communities.

A better regional synthesis of Neolithic pottery was produced by Simuyu Wandibba (1977), who used the key attributes of decorative techniques motifs and vessel shapes. As a result of this synthesis, five Neolithic wares were identified: Nderit, Narosura, Maringishu, Akira, and Elmenteitan or Remnant ware. Wandibba attempted to order the wares into a provisional chronological sequence on the basis of the stratigraphic sequence and radiometric dates and suggested that Nderit ware was the oldest, followed by Narosura, Maringishu, Elmenteitan, and eventually Akira.

The relationship among the various Neolithic entities has been a contentious issue among researchers mainly because there was no unified approach in defining such entities. Nonetheless, since the early 1980s, there has been agreement about naming the lithic industries, with somewhat less unanimity regarding the naming and chronological ordering of the ceramic entities. Stanley Ambrose (1984b, 1985) has examined the relationship between the various East African Neolithic sites in terms of their chronology, pottery, lithic artifacts, economy, and geographic distribution. According to Ambrose, there were three broad Neolithic groups, which could have been contemporaneous: the Savanna Pastoral Neolithic, the Elmenteitan, and the Eburran. The Eburran had previously been named “Kenya Capsian” by Louis and Mary Leakey (1931), but according to Ambrose (1980), it was a long-lived tradition indigenous to the central Rift Valley of Kenya.

Ambrose (1984a, 1984b) defined five phases of the Eburran, with the first four occurring around 1200 b.p., and the last, which is associated with ceramics and domestic animals, occurring about 3000 b.p. Although most Eburran sites are found in ecotones between forest and savanna, Ambrose (1984a, 1984b) argues that the Hyrax Hill Neolithic village and the Crescent Island causeway at Lake Naivasha, both found in open grasslands, are Eburran 5 sites. Both sites contain ceramic styles and lithic artifact technology found in savanna pastoral Neolithic sites. Ambrose contends that there are continuities from the early-Holocene Eburran technology and the Eburran 5 sites, and he argues that the Eburran 5 represents an adaptation of indigenous foragers to a stock-rearing way of life introduced into the region by immigrant herders.

The Elmenteitan, which had earlier been recognized by L. Leakey (1931) as part of the Middle Stone Age, was documented by later researchers as a distinctive lithic entity with an exclusively covarying ceramic style (Ambrose 1980, 1984a; Collett and Robertshaw 1983b; Nelson 1980). Using comparative metric studies of the stylistic aspects of the lithic assemblages, Ambrose characterized the Elmenteitan lithic industry as possessing large microlithic blade blanks and finished tools with a standardized size in geometric microliths. The ceramics associated with the Elmenteitan were called Remnant ware (after the type site) by Wandibba (1977) and Elmenteitan by D. Collett and P. Robertshaw (1983b). Unlike the other surviving Neolithic ceramics, the vessels often have lugs, are usually undecorated, and are mainly bowl forms in varying sizes.

The Savanna Pastoral Neolithic (SPN) on the other hand includes some sites referred to by L.S.B. Leakey as Kenya Wilton and some containing what Leakey called “Gumban A” pottery as well as other ceramic styles. The grouping is nonuniform in lithic terms so that most scholars now use a geographic/economic term instead of an industrial name derived from a type site.