- broader:: [[ceramics|pottery]] - related:: [[Jomon Pottery]] > [!quote] [Among the Earliest in World: Pottery by Hunter-gatherers in Japan](https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2022-04-28/ty-article/among-the-earliest-in-world-pottery-by-hunter-gatherers-in-japan/00000180-7eed-d9ba-a3f7-ffef956c0000) by [[Ruth Schuster]] via [[Haaretz]] on 2022-04-28 > > Around 14,000 years ago, the hunter-gatherers of Tanegashima made clay bowls and plates, well before farming began. > > About 14,000 years ago, prehistoric hunter-gatherers in southern Japan were making pottery. There are no signs whatsoever that the late Pleistocene inhabitants of Tanegashima Island had begun to settle down and grow food. They were foragers, hunter-gatherers and fishers, not farmers. > > Once, it had been assumed that pottery didn’t predate farming. For one thing, clay pots are fragile. For another, they’re heavy, and if one is a nomadic hunter-gatherer, one doesn’t want to lug about heavy loads of delicate items. (Beasts of burden wouldn’t be domesticated for another 10,000 years.) Third, making pottery requires at least several days of staying put. You knead the raw clay, ridding it of air bubbles that would cause the pot to explode during firing; you shape it into the desired form; then you let it dry – at least for days, often more – before firing it. If you fire it wet, it will crack. So hunter-gatherers on the move were not thought to have developed pottery. > > Except they did. It has now been amply shown that pottery preceded farming in eastern Asia, and now a geochemical analysis [published in March in PLOS One](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comments?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0265329) again puts the lie to the potting-farmer with unusually confident dating of clay bowls and plates on Tanegashima Island to around 14,000 years ago – long preceding the end of the Ice Age or advent of agriculture or animal husbandry. > > They are associated with the Incipient Jomon culture, which spanned from 14,000 to 13,500 years to 12,800 years ago. (The final phase of the Jomon culture was 300 B.C.E.) > > most of the early pottery found on Tanegashima was made locally. But 10 to 14 percent of it originated on other islands, which may attest to prehistoric cultural and trading relations, explains the team. Pottery itself was exchanged, or locally available goods may have been contained in pottery and were exchanged, Iizuka qualifies, adding: the decorative styles of the pottery are like that on southern Kyushu. > > as the Ice Age waned, the living at Sankakuyama was easy, with relatively reliable balmy weather. They wouldn’t have had to trek long distances to forage, the archaeologists believe. > > This would have enabled increased sedentarism, enabling pottery manufacture: no less than 4,000 pieces were found at Sankakuyama from the Incipient Jomon. The items were bowls – some shallow, some deep – and decorated mostly with appliqués bands, and some with shell or tool stamping and fingerprints. And some plates. > > Further suggesting sedentarism, the people had heavy-duty grinding stones and lived in pit-houses, Iizuka says, which applies to all the Incipient Jomon sites on Tanegashima. She adds that being inland but near the sea, there would have been plenty of seafood. Sadly, because the soil is acidic, bones from their repasts have not survived the ages. However, analysis of encrustations on the pottery indicates that they ate animals, plants and seafood. > > Because of the grind-stones, the many projectile points and the forested environs around the settlement, the archaeologists think the denizens probably ate a lot of nuts (which they would grind), and shot and ate a lot of animals. > > “There are some carbonized encrustations in the interior of vessels, and signature of plant and animals have been identified,” Iizuka says. > > So what do we have here? Extremely early pottery, which fits into the bigger picture of pottery plausibly beginning in eastern Asia and slowly, stutteringly, spreading.