To keep or to carry many foodstuffs – berries, grains, and so on – requires some kind of container. Before the invention of pottery, people used skins, or baskets made of leaves or twigs, but these let vermin in, and could be damaged by fire and water.
The pot, made out of widely available clay, provided a durable solution. Pots are not only relatively sturdy, but you can also cover them, so keeping the freshness in and the vermin out. Pots are waterproof, especially if fired, so will hold liquids. They are also fireproof, so they can be used for cooking food.
It used to be thought that pottery developed alongside agriculture around 10,000 years ago, but fragments found in a cave in southern China turned out to be twice as old, and have what appear to be scorch marks – indicating that the pots were used for cooking by nomadic hunters, long before settled farming. It is quite likely that pottery was invented independently – and also forgotten – in a number of different places at a number of different times.
Early pots usually had round bottoms, as edges are liable to crack. They were made by pinching or by coiling long ropes of clay, a laborious procedure simplified by the invention of the potter’s wheel in Mesopotamia around 6,500 years ago.
Firing pottery alters its chemistry and structure permanently, making it much more durable, and resistant to higher temperatures. The earliest known example of a fired pot comes from the Jamon culture of Japan, dating from 7,000 years ago. This might have been accidentally exposed to fire, but subsequently pots were fired in pits, at temperatures up to 900°C.
Pottery, food and drink
Until the advent of the pot, cooking meant either roasting items over the fire, or baking them in the embers. The fireproof, waterproof pot meant that people could now cook by boiling and stewing – techniques that extract nutrition from tough bits of animal carcass that would once have been discarded. The first known evidence of a dish cooked in this fashion dates from 8,000 years ago. It was a soup made from hippopotamus bones. One thousand years later people in Iran were fermenting grains in pottery jars to produce one of the first known beers.
Not all pottery is for practical purposes, and not all pottery consists of pots. Perhaps the earliest examples of non-functional earthenware are the figures of animals found in Croatia, made between 17,500 and 15,000 years ago. Several millennia later, the earliest civilizations – in Mesopotamia, China and India – made decorative tiles, statues and jewellery out of earthenware. These were often brilliantly coloured, the result of combining clays with other minerals and then firing the mixture – glazing. This method required the development of kilns that could reach much higher temperatures than could be achieved by pit firing.