The Xianrendong Pottery Extended Biography
The Xianrendong PotteryExtended BiographyYou may wish to share this biography with students, or just to read it for your own information.Most of the earliest pottery in the world has been discovered in the Yangzi River basin, but also in a larger area between Japan, the Amur basin, and the Yellow River basin. This pottery was first created around the last glacial age (25,000 to 19,000 years ag), as part of a toolkit that included small flake tools, microliths, and grinding slab stones. Together, these tools allowed people to get more nutrients from more foods—especially those that are hard to digest—by grinding and cooking them. Pottery in particular allows people to cook small seeds (like grains) whole. It also allows people to cook leaves and other plant parts that don’t grill very well. But we don’t know for sure if that was the reason pottery developed before agriculture. For example, grinding stones may have developed first to process pigments and non-food plants, rather than foods!In East Asia, pottery pre-dates agriculture by ten thousand years. In Mesopotamia, by contrast, agriculture preceded pottery. The people who used the pottery in Xianrendong cave were mobile foragers, rather than farmers. These Xianrendong pots were made from local clay, and probably fired (heated and dried) on an open fire rather than a kiln. The earliest pottery was pretty plain, but later pots had decorations—parallel striations on interior and exterior surfaces. They had round bottoms and thick walls. They were mostly coiled or sheet laminated. Many had exterior burns, suggesting they were used for cooking. Additionally, the ice age, 20,000 years ago, may have been a period of decreased food resource productivity, meaning that people were looking for new ways to eat starch-rich foods and meats.