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New Vistas on the Distant Past

Pottery and climate

People were travelling the globe long before the days of modern transport. Despite mighty barriers of desert and mountain, humankind had spread right across Europe and Asia before the last Ice Age forced them into habitable pockets amid the wastelands. Then as the climate improved for human life, movement began once more, together with innovation. As the glaciers melted, water was released to fall as rain, encouraging the spread of grassland across former deserts. Grasses with edible seeds offered themselves as a bountiful human food source. Rivers and lakes formed, not only providing drinking water, but aquatic foods. Foragers needed efficient ways to collect, store and serve this bounty, and to cook it too, as heating cereals increases their digestibility.

Clay pots were a versatile and practical solution. Though plastered baskets, wooden bowls, gourds or ostrich eggs could be used to gather and store cereals, they were not fireproof. An ancient method of cooking was to heat stones in a fire and then drop them into a pit lined with clay and filled with liquid, which could be brought to the boil that way and left to simmer. Another method was to wrap food such as fish in clay to protect it, as it cooked within a fire. Either of these two uses of clay could have suggested a more portable and permanent clay container. Pottery led to a revolution in cooking. Though there is no hard evidence that pottery-making was a female preserve, it would spring more naturally from the needs of foragers than hunters, and among surviving hunter-gatherers, men tend to hunt while women gather.

Pottery was independently invented in several parts of the globe, from Amazonia to China, in response to the same needs.^{1R. Haaland, Aquatic resource utilization and the emergence of pottery during the late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic: a global perspective from the Nile to China, chapter 9 in Terje Oestigaard (ed.), Water, Culture and Identity: Comparing Past and Present Traditions in the Nile Basin Region (2009).} In Europe we associate early pottery with the first farmers. Naturally cereal farmers needed grain storage. Yet foragers were collecting wild grains long before the idea came to sow seed. Evidence is building that pottery moved from east to west across Eurasia and south to north in Africa, independently of farmers. Only later came the spread of both agriculture and pottery from the Near East west across Europe and east into the Indus Valley.

From the Far East

The first pottery was made in the Far East, thousands of years before farming. The earliest sherds so far discovered are from the Yuchanyan Cave in southern China, radiocarbon-dated as c. 18,000 years old.^{2E. Boaretto et al., Radiocarbon dating of charcoal and bone collagen associated with early pottery at Yuchanyan Cave, Hunan Province, China, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, vol. 106 no. 24 (16 June 2009), pp. 9595-9600.} The fragments from the cave are shown here pieced together to form a rounded-based cauldron, ideal for heating foods within an open fire. The base could be pressed into the soil and ash to keep it steady. The heat would be evenly distributed through the pot, helping to prevent cracks and breakages. The earliest pottery was mainly thick, undecorated, V-shaped and completely utilitarian. The craft entered Japan from south Siberia with the Jōmon people, ancestors of the Ainu. Before the startling discovery in Yuchanyan Cave, early Jōmon pottery dates were the earliest anywhere. By around 15,000 years ago ceramics had also appeared in the Russian Far East.^{3Y.V. Kuzmin, Chronology of the earliest pottery in East Asia: progress and pitfalls, Antiquity, vol. 80, no. 308 (June 2006), pp. 362-371; Noboru Adachi et al., Mitochondrial DNA analysis of Hokkaido Jomon skeletons: Remnants of archaic maternal lineages at the southwestern edge of former Beringia, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, online 27 September 2011 before print.}

The idea was carried westwards across Siberia by hunter-gatherers. Around Lake Baikal in Siberia the favoured form of pot combined the pointed-base shape with an everted rim. The pots were mainly built up from clay coils, pinched together, and often left undecorated, though they could be net-impressed or cord-impressed. Perhaps the idea of this type of decoration arose from the use of net or cord to hang freshly-made pots to dry before firing. This type of pottery reached the Samara region in the middle Volga River valley by 7,000 BC. It was the first pottery in Europe. From there pottery of the same type had spread to the Baltic and Scandinavia by about 5,500 BC, before any sign of contact with farming.^{4P. Jordan, Understanding the spread of innovations in prehistoric social networks: new insights into the origins and dispersal of early pottery in Northern Eurasia, in Willy Østreng (ed.), Transference; Interdisciplinary Communications 2008/2009, Centre for Advanced Study, Oslo (Internet publication January 2010); H.G. McKenzie, Review of early hunter-gatherer pottery in Eastern Siberia, in P. Jordan and M. Zvelebil (eds.), Ceramics Before Farming: The dispersal of pottery among prehistoric Eurasian hunter-gatherers (2009), pp.166-207; D.W. Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel and Language (2007), p.149 and fig. 8.4.} Although pots are not people, and the idea of ceramics could spread without migration, I have hazarded a guess that pottery travelled from the Balkans to northern Europe with Y-DNA haplogroup I.

Wavy lines of Africa

North Africa was also ahead of the Near East in pottery production. As in the Far East, pottery was initially made by hunter-gatherers. Pots were used to make a fish stew, including flour presumably, for grinders are found with them. Early African pots had a characteristic wavy line or dotted wavy line decoration. The pots have rounded bottoms and a bowl shape. As in the Far East, the coil technique was used for making the pots. ^{5R. Haaland, Aquatic resource utilization and the emergence of pottery during the late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic: a global perspective from the Nile to China, chapter 9 in Terje Oestigaard (ed.), Water, Culture and Identity: Comparing Past and Present Traditions in the Nile Basin Region (2009).}

The origin point of this distinctive pottery has been much debated, since it appears right across the Sahara-Sahel Belt from the Nile Valley to West Senegal by the 8th millennium BC. ^{6F. Jesse, Wavy Line Ceramics: Evidence from North-Eastern Africa, chapter 6 in Fred Wendorf, Romuald Schild, Kit Nelson (eds.), Holocene Settlement of the Egyptian Sahara: The pottery of Nabta Playa (2002); A.S. Mohammed-Ali and A.-R.M. Khabir, The Wavy Line and the Dotted Wavy Line Pottery in the Prehistory of the Central Nile and the Sahara-Sahel Belt, African Archaeological Review, vol. 20, no. 1 (March 2003), pp. 25-58.} Now excavations in ravines at Ounjougou in Mali have produced ceramic fragments from before 9400 cal BC. So the likely area of pottery innovation is the Sahel zone between the Niger and the Nile. Pottery-making moved north into the Sahara during the warm and wet Holocene period. The African monsoon had shifted north, greening the Sahara. Hunter-gatherers took advantage of the lakes and grasslands that transformed the desert.^{7E. Huysecom et al., The emergence of pottery in Africa during the tenth millennium cal BC: new evidence from Ounjougou (Mali), Antiquity, vol. 83, no. 322 (2009), pp. 905–917; R. Haaland, Aquatic resource utilization and the emergenceof pottery during the late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic: a global perspective from the Nile to China, chapter 9 in Terje Oestigaard (ed.), Water, Culture and Identity: Comparing past and present traditions in the Nile Basin region (2009).}

Near Eastern coarse ware

Peter Jordan and Marek Zvelebil tentatively proposed that pottery entered the Near East from Central Asia.^{8P. Jordan and M. Zvelebil, Ex Oriete Lux, Chapter 1 in P. Jordan and M. Zvelebil (eds.), Ceramics Before Farming: The dispersal of pottery among prehistoric Eurasian hunter-gatherers (2009), p. 71.} This appealing idea faces a major problem. The earliest pottery in the Near East was different. A simple type found widely across the Upper Mesopotamian plains was flat-bottomed and not designed for use in cooking. Placed over an open fire, the base would heat up faster than the sides and cracks would appear. The clay was heavily tempered with chaff or other plant material, making it too porous to store liquids. The type is known as coarsely-made, plant-tempered (CMPT) ware. Well-fired CMPT pots were made from around 6550 BC, like the examples shown here from Tell Sabi Abyad, Syria.^{9O.P. Nieuwenhuyse et al., Not so coarse, nor always plain - the earliest pottery of Syria, Antiquity, vol. 84, no. 323 (March 2010), pp. 71–85.} Why the different approach to pottery? Boiling of food was achieved by updating the ancient method of heating stones. At Çatalhöyük balls of clay were heated up and placed into containers with food and liquid.^{10I. Hodder, Human-thing entanglement: towards an integrated archaeological perspective, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 17, no. 1 (March 2011), pp. 154–177.} Grain was not boiled in the Near East; it was ground into flour, then made into bread, baked in an oven.^{11R Haaland, Porridge and pot, bread and oven: Food ways and symbolism in Africa and the Near East from the Neolithic to the present, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, vol. 17, no. 2 (2007), pp. 167-83.} The pots were made differently from first principles. Early Near Eastern pottery was of sequential slab construction, not coil. Furthermore there was a phase of experimentation with sunbaked ceramics from about 7000 BC, leaving behind a trail of crumbling sherds in Northern Mesopotamia. That is a clear indication of local invention. The same slab technique has been found as far east as Mehrgarh in Pakistan, and as far west as Merimda in the Nile Delta.^{12Without subjecting a pot to X-ray, this construction can be mistaken for coil. P.B. Vandiver, Sequential slab construction: a conservative Southwest Asiatic ceramic tradition, ca. 7000-3000 B.C., Paléorient, vol. 13, no. 2 (1987), pp. 9-35.} These regions also received the rest of the Near Eastern Neolithic package : domesticated animals and cultivars native to the Near East.

Near Eastern cooking pots

In level VII at Çatalhöyük (c. 6800 BC) cooking methods changed. Clay cooking balls die out and cooking pots appear. Their use is clear. Not only do they show the surface smudging that we expect in a pot put over a fire, but they are adapted to the purpose. The new pots were large, thin-walled and mineral-tempered. Experiments have shown that heat transfer is more efficient in mineral-tempered pots than organic-tempered ones. The rounded base protected them from cracking in the fire, just like the earliest pots from the Far East and Africa. Ian Hodder conjectures that the big advantage of cooking pots was that they could be left on the fire, needing less attention than heating and re-heating cooking balls.^{13I. Hodder, Human-thing entanglement: towards an integrated archaeological perspective, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 17, no. 1 (March 2011), pp. 154–177.} Yet a cook would still need to keep the fire stoked and stir the pot now and then. So the advantage may rather have been the separation of food from the wood ash transferred on cooking balls.

Beginnings of burnishing

The surprise in recent years has been the discovery of fine pottery on sites in Syria and South-Eastern Turkey at earlier levels than the coarse ware. This pottery has thinner walls, made of a finer, mineral-tempered clay, suited to burnishing and painting. Burnishing is a time-consuming technique which makes pottery harder and more waterproof. The pot was rubbed inside and out with a smooth object, such as leather, a pebble or bone, until it became glossy. When fired this gave a lustrous finish. The example shown here from Shir has lost a lot of its lustre, but indicates the style. The pots were mainly dark grey (giving it the name Dark-Faced Burnished Ware), but could be painted in stripes. Such loving attention to pot-creation would make an expensive product; not surprisingly the results are thin on the ground, compared to CMPT. These sophisticated wares appear around 7000-6700 BC, immediately above deposits entirely devoid of ceramics. That suggests that they were not made locally, but came initally from elsewhere.^{14O.P. Nieuwenhuyse et al., Not so coarse, nor always plain - the earliest pottery of Syria, Antiquity, vol. 84, no. 323 (March 2010), pp. 71–85.} The source is so far unknown. However the fine ware springs from the sequential slab construction tradition of the Near East.^{15P.B. Vandiver, Sequential slab construction: a conservative Southwest Asiatic ceramic tradition, ca. 7000-3000 B.C., Paléorient, vol. 13, no. 2 (1987), pp. 9-35.}

The technique was used in Central Anatolia before 6400 BC, and exported westwards to the south-east of the Sea of Marmara and even reached a few sites near the southern Danube. The people using it around Marmara lived in rectangular houses of mud-brick or wood, clearly modelled on Central Anatolian sites such as Çatalhöyük. ^{16M. Ozdogan, Westward expansion of the Neolithic way of life: sorting the Neolithic package into distinct packages, in Paolo Matthiae, Frances Pinnock, Licia Romano, Lorenzo Nigro (eds.), Proceedings of the 6th International Congress of the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, vol. 1 (2010). pp. 883-893.}

Pottery gets prettier

A climatic crisis struck farmers around 6200 BC. The Sahara and the southern part of the Near East became arid, while farmers somewhat further north had to contend with violent seasonal weather swings. A number of sites in the Near Eastern cradle of farming, such as Çatalhöyük, were abandoned, while new farming sites suddenly appeared in Thrace, Macedonia, Thessaly, Bulgaria and North West Anatolia, which offered better conditions for rain-fed cereal farming.^{17J.-F. Berger and J. Guilaine, The 8200 cal BP abruptenvironmental change and the Neolithic transition: A Mediterranean perspective,Quaternary International, vol. 200, nos. 1-2 (1 May 2009), pp.31-49; D. C. Barber et al., Forcing of the cold event of 8,200 years ago by catastrophic drainage of Laurentide lakes, Nature, no. 400 (22 July 1999), pp. 344-348.} The wave of farmers seeking new homes carried fine pottery with them. A simple way to make pots more appealing had been discovered by this time. Colour can be added by dipping the pot into a coloured clay slip before firing. Red, burnished, monochrome pottery is found in Anatolia, the Balkans, Macedonia, and Thessaly at sites of around this date. At Sesklo in Thessaly, a house of 5400-5100 BC was discovered (see image) containing so much of this pottery that it was initially thought to be a potter's workshop.^{18B. Weninger et al., Climate forcing due to the 8200 cal BP event observed at Early Neolithic sites in the eastern Mediterranean, Quaternary Research, vol. 66 (2006), pp. 401–420.}

Within one or two generations, potters included painted patterns in their repertoire. As mentioned above, fine painted ware has been found on sites in Syria and South-Eastern Turkey around 7000-6700 BC, though its origin is unknown. Painted pottery then disappears from the record for about half a millennium.^{19O.P. Nieuwenhuyse et al., Not so coarse, nor always plain - the earliest pottery of Syria, Antiquity, vol. 84, no. 323 (March 2010), pp. 71–85.} It surfaces again about the time of the climate crisis of 6200 BC. In central Anatolia painted pottery is found at Hacilar from 6100 BC and then appears at nearby sites as they were reoccupied after the hiatus linked to the climate change.^{20L. Clare et al., Warfare in LateNeolithic\Early Chalcolithic Pisidia, southwestern Turkey: Climate induced social unrest in the late 7th millennium cal BC, Documenta Praehistorica, vol. 35 (2008), pp. 65-92.} At Tell Sabi Abyad in Syria pottery painted with geometric designs marks the start of the Halaf Culture, notable for making some of the finest ceramics prior to the potter's wheel.^{21P.M.M.G. Akkermans, et al.,Weathering climate change in the Near East: dating and Neolithic adaptations 8200 years ago, Antiquity, vol. 84, no. 325 (September 2010).} Halaf pottery was thin-walled, painted in one or two colours and then fired at high temperatures. This technically advanced product could have been crafted by specialist potters. At around the same time fine pottery appeared in courtyard houses at Tell Hassuna, characteristically decorated with a cream slip painted over with linear designs in red.

Yet the development of pottery was not a straightforward process from simple to sophisticated. The complex shapes and styles of Late Halaf pottery gave way to simpler shapes decorated in monochrome. During the Ubaid period a buff pottery painted in black or dark brown became common across a swathe of the Near East from southeastern Turkey to southwestern Iran.

New pottery in North Africa

Meanwhile in North Africa, the Sahara had switched from a humid phase to an arid one, though not as arid as today.^{22K. White and D. Mattingly, Ancient lakes of the Sahara, American Scientist, vol. 94, no. 1 (January 2006), pp. 58-65.} It has been argued that African cattle herding began at Bir Kiseiba and Nabta Playa in what is now the Western Desert of Egypt, near the country's southern border, between 9000 cal. BC and 7600 cal. BC. Nabta Playa was completely abandoned around 6000 cal. BC. When people returned there after 5900 cal. BC, they brought domesticated goats with them. Goats were native to the Near East. A new way of life had entered Egypt. Noriyuki Shirai suggests that it arrived from Sinai via the Red Sea. Certainly domesticated sheep or goats of the right period have been found near the Red Sea coast. But they have also been found in the Western Desert at Djara and Farafra Oasis.^{23N. Shirai, The Archaeology of the First Farmer-Herders in Egypt New Insights into the Fayum Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic (2000), chapter 2: Neolithisation in Egypt in a wider context.} These new people created a stone circle with links to the Near East. The trail of languages and genes suggests that pastoralists fleeing the arid Levant c. 6000 BC crossed to North Africa and, avoiding the swampy Nile Delta, travelled south along the chains of lakes, some to Chad and others to the oases of the Western Desert.^{24B. Arredi et al, A predominantly neolithic origin for Y-chromosomal DNA variation in North Africa, American Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 75, no.2 (2004), pp. 338-45; F. Cruciani et al., Human Y chromosome haplogroup R-V88: a paternal genetic record of early mid Holocene trans-Saharan connections and the spread of Chadic languages, European Journal of Human Genetics (2010), pp. 1–8.} Burnished pottery appears somewhat before 4900 BC at Nabta Playa. This replaced pottery of the wavy-line type found earlier in Africa.^{25I. Shaw (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt(2002), p. 34.}

As the desert encroached, it seems that some people abandoned the Western Desert region for the Nile Delta, though more farmers might have arrived from the Levant too. The Neolithic settlement at Merimda Beni Salama (5000-4100 BC) was built on a low terrace above the floodplain at the edge of the Western Nile Delta. The people there were completely sedentary, mixing cereal agriculture and pastoralism. The whole style of life was Levantine. Although their pottery was mainly coarse ware, some was red-coated and burnished. This type of fine pottery was perfected in the Badarian Culture (4400-4000 BC), which marks the spread of this life-style to Upper Egypt. Badarian potters achieved walls so thin that they were unequalled in delicacy by any subsequent Egyptian culture. The characteristic type has a rippled surface, achieved by combing before polishing, and a blackened top.^{26I. Shaw (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2002), pp. 37-41; N. Shirai, The Archaeology of the First Farmer-Herders in Egypt New Insights into the Fayum Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic (2000), chapter 2: Neolithisation in Egypt in a wider context.} Badari is the type site for the culture, but similar material has been found to the south at sites such as Nekhen (named Hierakonpolis by the Greeks). At Hierakonpolis fine ware vessels were fired in special kilns, located in the desert valleys. Potters seem to have specialized in either coarse or fine pottery.

The potter's wheel and gender change

Thus far we can picture pottery-making as a cottage industry at most. Women could easily have made the general run of pots for the household, as one of many domestic tasks. Signs of specialisation had appeared, however, among wealthy farming societies developing urban living. Such societies could support full-time craft-workers, invariably male. The adoption of the potter's wheel, which speeded up production, helped to make the craft more economically viable.^{27B.G. Wood, The Sociology of Pottery in Ancient Palestine (1990), p. 24.}

The idea sprang from simple antecedents. Coiled pots could be made on mats, turning the mat to easily handle the pot all round. The clue is that the mat left an impression in the base of the pot. Large leaves would serve the same purpose, or an old platter. The next step was to make a turntable specifically for the job, a pivoted platform known as a tournette. If wood was the usual material, that would help to explain why so few have been found.^{28P.R.S. Moorey, Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries: the archaeological evidence (1994), p. 146.} The discovery of two Early Bronze Age (c. 3500–2350 BC) tournettes at Tel Yarmuth in Southern Levant fills in an important part of the puzzle. Technological analysis revealed that potters coiled roughouts which were then thinned and/or shaped on the tournette. The potter could set the weel spinning with his hands or feet, but it would be most convenient to have an apprentice spin the wheel. A limited range of vessels at this site were fashioned on a tournette. It may have been the specialist equipment of a few potters catering to an urban elite.^{29V. Roux and P. de Miroschedji, Revisiting the History of the Potter's Wheel in the Southern Levant, Levant, vol. 41, no. 2 (Autumn 2009), pp. 155-173.}

Another type of tournette consisted of two pieces of stone fitted together: one has a conoid projection and the other a matching hollow. Examples have been found at potter's workplaces in Syro-Palestine from the Copper to the Iron Age.^{30P.R.S. Moorey, Ancient Mesopotamian Materials andIndustries: the archaeological evidence (1994), p. 146.}

Yet elsewhere the tournette was replaced by the fast wheel in the Middle Bronze Age. This invention changed the dynamics of the potter's wheel. A heavy wheel was spun on a shaft set into a stone socket. It used the principle of the flywheel. Once the wheel had been set spinning, momentum kept it going at a regular speed. Few early examples have been found. Their use is mainly deduced from the new type of pottery produced on the wheel. Instead of coiling the pot in the first instance, the pot is thrown i.e. shaped from a lump of clay placed in the centre of the wheel. Telltale rings can be seen on the inside of the pot, left by the potter's fingers pulling up the sides as it rotates. The outer surface would generally be smoothed. The fast wheel greatly speeded up the process, making at least simple pots commonplace, rather than luxury goods. The whole process of pottery-making is depicted in an Egyptian wall-painting from the tomb of Khnumhotep at Beni Hasan (1929-1895 BC). This drawing of one scene clarifies what is going on. The potter on the right cuts off a bowl from a hump of clay, using a string, whilst pulling round the turntable. His assistant seems to be wedging a piece of clay. Different shapes of vessel are illustrated above, including stemmed goblets, which are a product of the potter's wheel.

Not that all pottery was wheel-thrown from the Bronze Age onwards. A society needs a certain level of agricultural surplus to support such specialists as full-time potters. The wealth of a society can be judged by the sophistication of its pottery, until it reaches that happy stage of admiring the perfection of simplicity.

Notes

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Page created by Jean Manco 11 January 2011; last revised 12-11-2011.