Ceramics Before Farming

The Dispersal of Pottery Among Prehistoric Eurasian Hunter-Gatherers

Peter Jordan, Marek Zvelebil, Peter Jordan, Marek Zvelebil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315432359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

A long-overdue advancement in ceramic studies, this volume sheds new light on the adoption and dispersal of pottery by non-agricultural societies of prehistoric Eurasia. Major contributions from Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia make this a truly international work that brings together different theories and material for the first time. Researchers and scholars studying the origins and dispersal of pottery, the prehistoric peoples or Eurasia, and flow of ancient technologies will all benefit from this book.

Part 1

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

EX ORIENTE LUX: THE PREHISTORY OF HUNTER-GATHERER CERAMIC DISPERSALS

Peter Jordan and Marek Zvelebil

INTRODUCTION

The emergence of pottery remains one of the most important and longstanding issues in Old World archaeology. Since the inception of the discipline, the appearance of ceramics has provided archaeologists with primary data for constructing general chronologies of culture change. However, in European archaeology, the question of ceramic origins has been heavily influenced by broader debates surrounding the emergence of sedentary agricultural societies. To this day, there remains an implicit assumption that the earliest ceramic vessels were invented and used by the early farmers; moreover, if pots were a distinctive feature of farming societies, then the dispers al of ceramics must have been linked to the spread of agriculture. Through time, the arrival of ceramics and the spread of farming have become central themes in broader narratives about the transition to agriculture in a post-glacial world.

In contrast, the potential role of hunter-gatherer societies in the invention and dispersal of pottery technology has seen much less consideration. Where pottery was recorded in non-farming contexts, it was generally thought to represent partial adoption of the wider ‘package’ of traits that made up the Neolithic, part of a wider set of cumulative processes that would end with the inevitable replacement of foraging practices and populations by new forms of social life grounded in the farming economy.

These deeply established assumptions about the relationship between pottery, early agricultural dispersals and hunter-gatherers are now approaching a fundamental revision. Recent years have witnessed a rapid accumulation of new dates and material from across northern Eurasia, in particular, from Japan, China and the Russian Far East, which demonstrate long-term, extensive, and most importantly, ‘independent’ invention and use of pottery by hunter-gatherers long before the transition to agriculture in the early Holocene. These emerging insights challenge established histories of ceramic technology in three crucial ways: firstly, in some regions the earliest pottery is older than the start of the Holocene, making it clear that the first ceramic vessels must have been invented in the Pleistocene hunter-gatherer societies of the Upper Palaeolithic; secondly, the earliest pottery predates farming in many regions of northern Eurasia, indicating that knowledge of pottery technology spread without any association with agriculture, and that Upper Palaeolithic and early Holocene hunting and gathering societies were responsible for this dispersal process; thirdly, the growing evidence for early and very widespread use of ceramics by Eurasian hunting and gathering societies indicates that pottery can have an ‘independent’ technological history entirely distinct from that of the subsequent plant and animal domestications that characterized the Neolithic. Finally, the fresh materials and dates also contribute to the more general realization that the significance and diversity of this hunter-gatherer ceramic ‘horizon’ has yet to receive systematic attention from archaeologists. However, they also signal exactly where a new period of integrated research could begin.

The present volume initiates the process by undertaking the first continent-wide English language synthesis of pottery use amongst prehistoric hunter-gatherers, reconstructing the characteristics, chronologies and historical trajectories of early ceramic technologies as they were dispersed across northern Eurasia, subject to the data currently available. The volume also highlights significant gaps in current knowledge, and we suggest specific themes and regions where more work is required in order to investigate the local dynamics of the more general ceramic dispersal process.

The volume also attempts to identify new ways in which the invention, adoption, and use of pottery by hunter-gatherer societies might be researched and understood. We recognize a sense of creativity, contingency and technological improvisation by emphasizing the role of pottery as a cultural tradition. This would have been gradually incorporated into the social life of hunter-gatherer communities, and passed between generations and communities, resulting in innovations and transformations. By foregrounding the contingency of social tradition, we break from the constraints imposed by general schemes of social and technological progress, and we are also able to acknowledge the broader importance of ecological and environmental settings without assuming that pottery could function as no more than an adaptive ‘tool’.

The present volume reflects the collective efforts of the two editors and contributing authors over recent years. The ambitious scale and international nature of the project have also meant that the volume has been a long time in production. The volume’s more general origins can be traced back even further, with one of us (Marek Zvelebil) developing an interest in the hunter-gatherer pottery use and its origins in the 1980s (Zvelebil 1986c, d).

Despite long-standing recognition of widespread use of ceramics among north European hunter-gatherers, a recognition that generated a tradition of research among Finnish, Swedish and East Baltic archaeologists (Ailio 1909; Ayräpää 1952, 1955; Carpelan 1979; Edgren 1966, 1970, 1982; Halen 1994; Hulthén 1977, 1991; Larsson 2004, 2006; Meinander 1954, 1961, 1979; Nuñez 1975, 1990; Papmehl-Dufay 2006; Siiriäinen 1971, 1981, 1984; Welinder 1976; also Jaanits 1959; Kriiska 2004 in Estonia), the use of ceramics in hunter-gatherer communities continued to be regarded as a peripheral cultural practice in mainstream European prehistory that was more concerned with the development of farming societies and the emergence of cultural complexity. By the mid-1980s it was becoming increasingly apparent that the appearance of pottery in northern Europe may not have been connected to farming dispersals, but had its own historical trajectory, and that it was much more than a phenomenon marginal to the early spread of Neolithic farming societies across Europe—even though contacts and exchanges between foragers and farmers did exist (Zvelebil 1986d: 171, fig. 4; 1998a). The early use of ceramics among post-glacial hunter-gatherers extended well beyond the forager–farmer contact zones. This was puzzling, as pottery had previously been assumed to constitute an essential element of the Neolithic ‘package’ that was spreading slowly northwards through Europe. The presence of pottery in distant hunter-gatherer regions created a fundamental challenge to the established understandings of earlier prehistory. Even so, as many recent accounts indicate, hunter-gatherer ceramic-using societies continued to be regarded as a curious anomaly, resulting from contact with Neolithic farmers and requiring a special name within the social-evolutionary framework (such as sub-Neolithic, or para-Neolithic!), rather than warranting their own further research as distinct cultural traditions (i.e., Nuñez 1990; for an overview, see Werbart 1998; Zvelebil 1986c).

This conceptual problem did not exist for Soviet archaeologists, who were interpreting evidence for culture change within a Marxist-sanctioned evolutionary framework. In contrast to western notions of a Neolithic defined principally by farming, for Soviet archaeologists, it was the emergence of pottery that served as the key event defining the start of the Neolithic epoch. As a result, scholars of the Soviet era paid greater attention to ceramic technology in hunter-gatherer contexts. For example, in northeastern Europe, Matiushin, Timofeev, Dolukhanov and Foniakov provided the first reliable chronological frameworks and systematic cultural descriptions of hunter-gatherer pottery (Dolukhanov 1979, 1986a, 1986b; Dolukhanov and Foniakov 1984; Matiushin 1976, 1986; Timofeev 1987, 1990, 1998, 1999). Consequently, while in the West this phenomenon remained a marginal development, in the East it has become a central, epoch-defining event (see below).

These new materials and chronologies generated a series of important questions about the established history of ceramic origins. In particular, they indicated that either the local invention, or arrival, of ceramics in northern Europe had taken place at a much earlier date than previously thought, suggesting that the northern pottery was not linked to the dispersal of farming from the Near East. For example, at the Volga-Ural interfluve, early ceramics were eventually dated to c. 9,000 BP (8,000 BC), and in the Upper Volga Basin the first dated wares, which fall to 7,300 BP (6,000 BC), and also may have served as source areas for the first pottery in the eastern Baltic, where ceramics appear by 6,500 BP (5,400 BC) (Cyrek et al. 1986; Dolukhanov et al. 2005; Kempisty 1986; Nuñez 1990; Rimantiené 1992, 1998; Timofeev 1987, 1990, 1998). However, for a number of years these ‘strange noises from the east’ (Pavel Dolukhanov, TAG Conference Session, see below) did not attract significant attention.

Further crucial developments came in the later 1990s with publication of new dates for early pottery from eastern Eurasia, from China, Japan and the Amur. Some were so old that they caused initial disbelief, until validation confirmed that use of pottery amongst late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers was a rather widespread phenomenon, at least in East Asia. They also added another dimension to debates about the first pottery in northern Europe, which lay far outside the arrival zone of early farmers, and raised the possibility that there was an original source area for a distinct hunter-gatherer ceramic tradition that lay further to the east. The arrival of pottery into hunter-gatherer societies in northern Europe may have formed the most westerly evidence for a continent-wide dispersal event whose ultimate origins were located in the emergence of early pottery in the Far East of Asia (Kuz’min and Orlova 2000).

More recently, the idea of publishing the volume was triggered by a guest lecture given by Dr. Viktor Vetrov, Irkutsk State Pedagogical University, Russia, at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, in the spring of 2003 (attended by Peter Jordan). The speaker described the Ust’ Karenga ceramic assemblages from eastern Siberia which were dated to 10,000 BP (Vetrov 1985, and see McKenzie, this volume). During a later meeting at Sheffield University, the editors happened to discuss this new evidence, and in particular, its potential to ‘bridge’ the eastern and western chronologies of early pottery, and thereby shed new light on the wider history of ceramic dispersals. Plans for a volume exploring the earliest use of ceramics across northern Eurasia were developed rapidly, and activities began ...