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Introduction

The term pottery lacks a universally agreed definition. On the one hand the term is sometimes taken to exclude all wares except for vessels, but on the other hand it is sometimes taken in a broader sense to include such things as, for example, figurines, statuettes and tiles.

References

Jomon

The earliest pottery vessels known are those made by the Incipient Jomon people of Japan around 10,500 BC. Of these wares Jared Diamond writes ”For the first time in human experience, people had watertight containers readily available in any desired shape. With their new ability to boil or steam food, they gained access to abundant resources that had previously been difficult to use: leafy vegetables, which would burn or dry out if cooked on an open fire; shellfish, which could now be opened easily; and toxic foods like acorns, which could now have their toxins boiled out. Soft-boiled foods could be fed to small children, permitting earlier weaning and more closely spaced babies. Toothless old people, the repositories of information in a preliterate society, could now be fed and live longer. All those momentous consequences of pottery triggered a population explosion, causing Japan’s population to climb from an estimated few thousand to a quarter of a million.”

Venus of Dolni Vetonice

• "Yet from the famous site of Dolni Vetonice in Czecholslovakia, where Upper Palaeolithic huts have been dated to 23,000 BC and whose associated flint industry is Eastern Gravettian, comes the fired-clay Venus figurine, the oldest identified (Wymer 19828: 262) Not an isolated find, the figurine was recovered along with 2,200 pellets of baked clay, some of which were fragments of broken or unfinished statuettes (ibid 239). Wymer himself concludes, not only that pottery figurines are unknown from any other Upper Palaeolithic site, but that ‘this invention of ceramic techniques was a flash which failed to ignite any need or response in the community and probably died with its inventor"

The Emergence of Civilization: From Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture, Cities, and the State in the Near East. Charles Keith Maisels. American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 98, No. 4 (Oct., 1994), pp. 776-777

• “Although the earliest fired pottery based on wet clay and bone was unearthed at Vestonice (Czechoslovakia) and dated 25,000 years ago”

Ethics, Tools, and the Engineer. R.E. Spier. CRC. 2001. ISBN 0849337402

• “But most communities, tending their crops in the Neolithic Revolution, soon discover the technique and use of pottery. With one remarkable exception, at Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic (where models of animals and a Venus figurine have been dated to about 25,000 years ago), the earliest examples come from the Middle East, the region where agriculture first develops. Pottery fragments from about 6500 BC have been found at Catal Huyuk in Turkey”

http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ab98

• “Soffer and her coworkers previously identified impressions of woven material on 27,000-year-old pottery from a Czech Republic site”

Science News. Vol. 158. No. 17, 2000. P.g 261.

• “Artifacts from a 27,000-year-old site in the Czech Republic indicate that a broad spectrum of its ancient residents—including women, children, and the elderly—joined hunting expeditions in which rabbits, foxes, and other small prey were caught in homemade nets. Communal hunting of this type occurs in some modern hunter-gatherer groups and typically results in large food yields, ceremonial gatherings, and feasts, says study director Olga Soffer of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Soffer and her colleagues identified impressions of woven material on pottery fragments found at the site. “

Science News. Vol. 153, No. 21, 1998, p. 331

• “The oldest ceramic ever manufactured, the Venus of Dolni Vestonice, is displayed at the Anthropology Museum, at Brno, Czech Republic. The Venus of Dolni Vestonice was visited by Prof. Joseph Davidovits who writes: ” I still had for my eyes the image of the yellow limestone Venus displayed at the Vienna Museum, Austria, to be very surprised by this one. It was not worked in soft stone, but manufactured out of terra cotta. Thus, I was looking at the oldest ceramic manufactured by Homo Sapiens 25.000 years ago (...) We have been taught that the terra cotta pottery was not invented before the Neolithic Age, 15.000 years later. And yet, I had in front of me an artifact resulting from the use of fire, at a time when, logically, the prehistoric men did not master this technique, according to the teaching of Prehistory.”

GeoPolymer Institute News. 28 June 2006

• "Dolni Vestonice was an Upper Paleolithic habitation in Czechoslovakia on a swamp at the joint of two rivers near the Moravian mountains. In the spring of 1986, near the village of Dolni Vestonice, the remains of three teenagers were discovered in a common grave. Approximatley 27,640 years had passed from the time of the burial until they were found. Two of the skeletons were heavily built males while the third was judged to be a female based on its slender proportions. Archaeologists who examined her skeletal remains found evidence of a stroke or other illness which left her painfully crippled and her face deformed. The two males had died healthy, but remains of a thick wooden pole thrust through the hip of one of them suggests that the death didn’t happen naturally. On the ground surrounding the burial site, red ocher powder was splashed, which was thought to be for protection. Dolni Vestonice is also the site of the earliest known potter’s kiln. For acres around, the fertile clay soil is seeded with carved and molded images of animals, women, strange engravings, personal ornaments, and decorated graves. In the main hut, where the people ate and slept, two items were found: a goddess figurine made of fired clay and a small and cautiously carved portrait made from mammoth ivory of a woman whose face was drooped on one side. The goddess figurine is the oldest known baked clay figurine. On top of its head are holes which may have held grasses or herbs. The potter scratched two slits that stretched from the eyes to the chest which were thought to be the life-giving tears of the mother goddess. Above the encampment in a small, dry-hut, whose door faced towards the east, was the kiln. Scattered around the oven were many fragments of fired clay. Remains of clay animals, some stabbed as if hunted, and other pieces of blackened pottery still bear the fingerprints of the potter.”

Minnesota State University. http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/archaeology/sites/europe/dolni_vestonice.html

Amur

• "Three major events in Northeast Asian prehistory, specifically pottery invention, shellfish utilization, and dryland millet agriculture, can be correlated within the region on the base of the ancient cultures 14C date sequences. The pottery emergence seems to happened independently in different areas of East Asia, including southern Japan, ca. 12,000-12,700 BP; southern China, ca.11,000-14,000 BP; and the Amur River basin, ca. 13,000 BP."

Kuzmin1 Y.V., Timothy Jull A.J., Orlova L.A., Sulerzhitsky L.D. Radiocarbon Chronology Of Stone Age Cultures Of The Russian Far East And Their Correlation With Adjacent Areas In Northeast Asia Centre de Datation Par Le Radiocarbone, Université Claude Bernard, Lyon. http://carbon14.univ-lyon1.fr/stonage.htm

• "The majority of Japanese scholars believed, and still believe, that pottery production was first invented in mainland Asia and subsequently introduced into the Japanese archipelago." and explains that "A series of excavations in the Amur River Basin in the 1980s and 1990s revealed that pottery in this region may be as old as, if not older than, Fukui Cave pottery"

Ancient Jomon of Japan", Habu J. Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-77213-3

• "The new results of AMS 14C dating of the earliest pottery from the Russian Far East, Osipovka, Gromatukha and Novopetrovka cultural complexes (Amur River basin), are presented. Pottery temper (represented by sedge grass) was chosen for dating; pottery-associated charcoal was also dated. The earliest pottery from the Amur River basin nowadays may be dated to ca.13 000 BP (ca.16 000 cal BP), and this is one of the oldest potteries in East Asia, and in Old World in general."

AMS 14C age of the earliest pottery from the Russian Far East: 1996–2002 results. Derevianko A.P. Kuzmin Y.V., Burr G.S., Jull A.J.T., Kim J.C. Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B 223–224 (2004) 735–739

• "One of the most important findings is that there were at least two independent centers of pottery origins in Northeast Asia, namely the Japanese Islands and the Lower Amur River basin (ca. 13,000 bp)"

Radiocarbon Chronology of Paleolithic and Neolithic Cultural Complexes from the Russian Far East. Kuzmin Y.V. Journal of East Asian Archaeology. Volume 3, Nos. 3-4. September, 2001

• "An early centre of pottery-making has been identified in the Russian Far East on the lower stretches of the Amur River: Gasya (14,200 - 10,690 cal BC), Khummi (14,600 - 9700 cal BC) and Goncharka (13,400 - 9700 cal BC), as well as Gromatukha on the Zeya River (13,500 - 9230 cal BC. Early dates have been obtained for pottery-bearing sites in the Trans-Baikal province in southern Siberia: Ust-Karenga (11,600 - 10,450 cal BC), Ust-Kyakhta (11,900 - 11,150 cal BC) and Studenoye (11,250 - 10,350 cal BC). At these sites, the subsistence was based on huntingegathering and intense procurement of aquatic resources. Their pottery assemblages are stylistically unrelated to each other and are believed to be local inventions. One may only speculate that pottery-making independently developed in the context of broad-spectrum huntergathering economies. This technical novelty initially emerged in the forest-steppe belt of northern Eurasia starting at about 14,500 cal BC, and spread to the west to reach the south-eastern confines of East European Plain by 7000 cal BC."

The chronology of Neolithic dispersal in Central and Eastern Europe. Journal of Archaeological Science 32 (2005) 1441 – 1458 Dolukhanov P., Shukurov A., Gronenborn D, Sokoloff D., Timofeev V., Zaitseva G.

• "In the same area, the first evidence for the manufacture of pottery demonstrates the presence of a Neolithic culture between 13,260 and 10,340 BP."

Radiocarbon dating Of Climatic And Cultural Changes On The Russian Far East During The Late Glacial And Holocene Kuzmin Y.V., Burr G.S., O'Malley J.M., Jull A.J.T. Presented Seventh Annual V. M. Goldschmidt Conference, Tucson, USA. June, 1997

• "To begin with, the whole pottery picture has been revolutionized in the past three years. For example, our pottery at Xian Ren Dong is about 13,000 years old and is similar to the pottery recently discovered by a Japanese-Russian expedition in the Amur River area, which is made in the same way."

An Interview with Richard S. MacNeish. Current anthropology. Volume 42, Number 5, December 2001