While I waxed lyrical about Bread a couple days ago, I must confess that, in comparison, ancient Pottery has seemed a little underwhelming. It’s been the part of the museum I slog through, wedged between those fascinating replicas of the Gate of Ishtar and the Egyptian mummies. Oh, look yet another brown glaze!
Yet if there ever was a thing that humans invented and re-invented, in one culture after another, it is cookware. Archaeologists can find buried treasure, in fact, treasure troves just by spotting an ancient “shard” in the trash heaps, among the cigarette butts and plastic bags. Dating the shards can be tricky, but technology has improved its precision. It was once thought that dishes to hold food were created after the invention of organized farming (@10,000 ya), but recent finds on digs have unearthed pots far earlier.
Personally, I can’t tell quartz from limestone, but I’ll bet Paleolithic and Neolithic people could look at the dirt in my neighborhood and explain it to me. Certainly, it makes sense that Stone Age people would have been experts in geology. If they could find the right kind of rocks to hone the points of other rocks and create sparks for fire, then they could make their own rocks, which is why today’s post is all about Dishes. Let’s explore three topics:
- A core definition of the “thing”
- Where and when it happened first “around the world”
- How it influenced human development
What You Can’t Eat With Your Hands
Not every culture invented a complicated calendar, mathematics, or even the wheel (hold that thought). But everybody used pots. Of course, I can’t prove that every single culture developed ceramic glazes or kilns, but I will guarantee you they all invented bowls, for a very simple reason: You can’t carry water in a leaf.
You can wrap fish in a leaf, spear mammoth meat on a stick, or spread bread on a flat stone for cooking. But if you want to make beer or mix bread dough, you need a vessel to carry the liquid. Ancient people, as I’ll explain shortly, even had recipes for meat stew. But they still needed cookware for anything liquid. Even if they cooked all their meat on flat rocks and otherwise ate raw fruit and nuts, they still needed water to live, water which had to be carried to their fire pits, rock shelters, or caves. Cupped hands don’t really get very far.
We know homo erectus learned to control fire somewhere between 1-2 million years–that’s a long stretch, but we’ll let the paleoanthropologists work out the details. One enterprising researcher looked at a two-million-year-old molar from Olduvai Gorge and argued that the scratches meant that this homo species was using a toothpick. Food was less cumbersome to eat, chew, and swallow when cooked, and it provided more nutrition. The people who evolved into homo sapiens had digestive systems which adapted to cooked meat. They also migrated, which is why firepits, stone tools, and pottery is found in Neolithic settlements all across the world.
The earliest fired clay was not pots, but figurines. Animals and human figures fashioned from clay and crushed mammoth bone, for example, found in the Czech Republic, were dated back 30,000 years. We don’t know how long humans went from making action figures to bowls, but the dishes that have been found certainly predate the rise of agriculture. While lots of focus in world history textbooks concentrate on Egypt and Sumeria, when it comes to pots, anthropologists have to keep going much farther east of the Fertile Crescent.
Fine China, Indeed!
In the late 1990s, archaeological digs in Japan began turning up poetry that could be dated back to 14,500 BCE. They even named the entire settlement period the Jomon Period after the pottery style, which had ropes or lines etched around the outside (see figures top of post). The etched lines was something also found all across Europe, which is why these Neolithic cultures are often called Linear Pottery cultures.
In 2012, vessels were unearthed much older than Linear Pottery or even than the Japanese Jomon-ware: 18,000 BCE. Found in Xianrendong Cave in Western China, they were formed during the Ice Age, what the anthropologists term the LGM (Late Glacial Maximum).
Ceramics nerds might quickly volunteer that, hey did you know the earliest glazed stoneware came from China, that Chinese porcelain was one of the most valuable exports along the Silk Road, and that the secret of fine China was closely held well into the 18th century? If Chinese potters had a 10,000 year head start, it would explain a lot!
Dig a Little Deeper
Archaeological sites in East Asia have such a rich tradition of ceramic excellence that it’s not a surprise they might have began making pots so long ago. However, it turns out that there are other pottery cultures that go back more than 10,000 years. What’s really surprising is that this has only recently been discovered. Researchers in Africa in the 21st century have begun finding 10-12,000-year-old pottery from Mali and Ghana in Western Africa.
Given that hominids emerged from Africa in the first place, it’s a little surprising that it’s taken this long for anthropologists to study complex dishware in the way they’ve been doing in Asia. An analysis by Derek Watson on a dig in Ghana in this vein because he lays out not only his findings, but their comparison with earlier findings. He describes how digs back in 1944 and in 1975 found some pots, but these only dated back to 2-3000 BCE, i.e. “post-Egypt.” Watson went deeper in the site, uncovering pottery in one layer after another, millennia after millennia, finally ending at the bottom of the clay layer with pottery shards as far back as 10,580 BCE.
The graphic shared by Watson is what you see in these archaeological journal papers, charts with dates and cross-referenced diagrams with layers of soil. What caught my eye is how far they went in 1944 (the blue highlight mid page) vs. how much further Watson’s effort progressed by 2017. Watson even noted that the 1944 Scott paper was one of very few event looking at western Africa for sophisticated cultures in early settlements. In comparison, there have been hundreds of studies across Europe, which have led to complex stratifications and subcategorizations of all the Linear Pottery cultures of the 5-6000s. Maybe the grant applications for western Africa needed to include the words “Linear Pottery Culture” or “Egypt” in them. (That’s a joke. Maybe.)
Garlic Was Everywhere
What’s less controversial and more palatable, if you’ll forgive the pun, is that anthropologists often know what was in the pots. The Chinese pots, no surprise, probably contained rice. We also saw the 4000-year-old noodles in 4000-year-old bowls the other day, bowls also still intact. Seafood in the Japanese pots, makes sense.
By the time we reach the cultures with writing, we get another bonus along with the pottery: recipes! Back in Mesopotamia, lamb stew includes meat, fine-grained salt, barley cakes, Persian shallots, milk, and onion. You also crush and add leeks and garlic. (Both?!?!? Root bulb vegetables grew really easily.
This pottery shard unearthed in Germany dated back to 3900 and was found with a gourmet ingredient still clinging to it–garlic mustard. Garlic apparently grew easily all across Eurasia!
Get Creative
Once you move into “later ancient” history (that’s not an oxymoron to me anymore), the creativity on the pottery begins to explode. The Minoans and other early Greeks loved swirls. The Far East used multiple styles of etching, then added that glazing technique. Perhaps because it was something manufactured so broadly and so often, there was plenty of time and ways to experiment.
They even found pottery out on an island in the state of Georgia which dated back a few thousand years. This would have been created long after the migration to the Americas, so cultures would still be experimenting. The researchers found that the clay had been tempered with added fibers which evened out the firing process. On the one hand, it seems like a waste that so many had to re-invent so often–couldn’t they just search the Internet? On the other hand, it’s what created all the variation in cultural approach so that we can distinguish one from another now.
Why God Invented the Wheel
All that creativity bursting out into the dishware meant that pottery became an art form unto itself, whether it had figurines painted on it or simply a pretty glaze. Art made it beautiful, like an offering, which meant it also became part of spiritual ceremonies. And it’s probably no surprise that pottery itself became linked to the gods.
There’s controversy about where, when, and how the wheel was invented, but one thing is known: not everyone used it for transportation. One of the most prevalent early uses of the wheel was for pottery. The Egyptians revered the process of creating beautiful dishes so much that they connected it to the god Ptah, god of craft workers and artisans.
One common image of Ptah was of him creating the Egg of the World, fashioning it on the all-important potter’s wheel. Thus are honored those who fashioned the crafts, the bowls and vessels which contained all the important things to be consumed which were life-sustaining.
Who needs transportation when you can have a really nice bowl?