The Invention of Pottery: 8,000 Years BEFORE Göbekli Tepe | Ancient Architects
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- Опубліковано 4 кві 2022
- For months now I’ve made many videos on Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites like Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe and so on and even though I write and say the term so often, the actual words ‘Pre-Pottery Neolithic’ have almost lost all meaning, so much so that I’m write PPN in my scripts and notes.
The Pre-Pottery Neolithic is, well, the Neolithic era for a culture but before they had invented pottery. There is no trace in the archaeological record at the 11-12,000 year old sites in Anatolia, with vessels, plates, jugs, jars and storage containers all being cut from stone, a laborious but necessary task.
These people were skilled craftsmen and women, capable of carving fabulous statues and stone pillars, incredible tools and vessels, and even creating concrete-esque terrazzo artificial-stone flooring. They were capable and intelligent but they still hadn’t worked out how to make pottery, so when was it first invented?
In this video I look at the invention of pottery and how it was actually created 8,000 years before the building of Göbekli Tepe. I explain why pottery was such an important invention and how humanity were advanced and skilled enough to kick-start civilisation when climate conditions were right.
All images are taken from Google Images and the below sources for educational purposes only. Please subscribe to Ancient Architects, Like the video and please leave a comment below. Thank you.
Also, check out the fantastic video on the subject by Stefan Milo at • The Invention of Potte...
Sources:
www.sciencedirect.com/science...
oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.c...
www.thoughtco.com/yuchanyan-c...
ezinearticles.com/?The-Import...
www.cambridge.org/core/journa...
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s...
www.newscientist.com/article/...
#AncientArchitects #Inventions #AncientHistory
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So when you upload a video privately, then at the time you make it public, is when it's published to us all, correct? 😇
bruh places where they used pottery wasnt afflicted by ice age at all, they had pretty much warm climate over there
What about "out of place artifacts" like poetry found in coal mines? There many more but I would say that is the most famous one to point out
Sensational information presented without sensationalism; what a relief.
You could totally hold my attention for 30+ minutes everytime you make a video. And I would happily wait for longer form content.
Not going to lie, I have never even thought about putting clay over a basket to make pottery. Now that you mention it, it makes complete sense to me. Thanks again for the great content and making me think about different ways ancient humans were surviving harsh climates.
It does make sense doesn’t it? So simple but so effective!
Wow yer its seems so obvious now 🙄
sure you already got the shape you want so press the clay in there and fire the basket away in the fire. We used to do that to create hollow forms for metalworking. Craft techniques are nifty!
Rather almost like carbon fiber is made today.
No plastic
I paused the video to take a screenshot of the graphic that goes from "First Pottery" to "My House" because it made me laugh out loud. Nicely done. Great channel
Asian cord wrapped ware looks amazingly like the pottery found here on the East Coast of North America. Look at Jomon pottery from Japan and Iroquois pottery from New York. I've made the cord wrapped paddles used and reproduced the pottery myself.
I see someone else mentioned it below, but a fascinating idea about the evolution of pottery. Used to initialy waterproof woven containers. Brilliant, but so simple. Makes me wonder about cordedware pottery. It may not have been fired the same way, but just continuing the traditional aesthetic. Reminds me of the idea stone pillars copy the look of pillars made from reeds. Another great, eye opening, and thought provoking, video. Thanks.
Considering how brittle and fragmentary were the shards found, we are lucky to have even that much evidence. Amazing detective work is needed to piece together the evidence [this looks like an intentional pun, but I'll leave it for readers to wonder if it is or isn't]. Thanks, Matt, for yet another glimpse into the far distant in time lives of our ancestors.
Pottery is actually reasonably indestructible, it is why we have such an extensive artefact record and why it is used as the primary source for dating.
You forgot the fact that it was found in southern China.
Hot weather severely degrades artifacts and fossils. The oldest fossil DNA from europe are 50,000ya, while the oldest fossil DNA from SEasia is 8000ya. Despite this, Southeast asia still has the oldest cave art (45,0000ya)
As I recall from a period where I was fascinated by pottery, there is a theory that cooking baskets were lined with clay which then led to the baskets being used as molds to produce pure clay bowls, etc. Doing this during the ice age actually makes a lot of sense. Firing the clay may have been an accidental discovery when a basket got too hot, leaving only the clay lining at some point. Our ancestors were smart people to recognize that the pottery was more resilient than the baskets ... Nice presentation.
Yep! That's what we learned in class. I was a professional potter for over 20 years and this makes perfect sense There is archaeological evidence of this. Clay pots with basket impressions, also people who still boil water in baskets over fire.
Can you suggest any resources for this theory of clay lined baskets preceding the introduction of pottery? I find this fascinating. Also, I've seen traditional Native American tightly woven cooking baskets in use. As I understand it these were not actually placed in the fire, though accidents would have happened. Even animal skin bags were used for cooking in the same way--with hot stones dropped inside. It's like we are missing aomething or it's staring right at us and we don't quite get it, yet. So somewhere along the way people got the idea to line the inside of baskets. Maybe by using clay lined depressions first they got the idea. I suspect carrying water came before the clay lining, then the cooking followed.
@@tonygrowley5275 I'm interested in learning which groups might still be using woven baskets over fires. Do you know of any resources I could look up?
@@tonygrowley5275 I just found the hangi used by the Maori. It is a stonelined firepit where they cook food in covered baskets. Fascinating.
The earliest pottery may well have been discovered, rather than invented. You can cook a fish, wrapped in seaweed or wet greens. Cover it in clay, and set it in the coals to bake. Juicy , evenly cooked and not subject to scorching or ashes. You pop one in the fire, but you fall asleep. When you awaken, many hours later, your fire has dwindled and your fish wrap is hard as a rock. So, you crack it open, and extract your dry, overcooked fish. But you are left with the hard, though largely intact hull of your fish-cooking vessel. You play with it, and discover that it holds water, and doesn`t dissolve back into gooey clay.
These first potters were hunter-gatherers. They were migratory, carrying only essentials when making camp. Baskets are light, pottery is heavy. I would wager that most pots in this era, were made as part of establishing a new camp. Most riverbanks contain clay, and generations of smart, observant people would recognize the properties of different clay soils and understand how they behaved when wet, sun dried and fired (accidentally or otherwise)
Pre-agricultural pottery is rare for a reason. It was heavy, fragile, and of limited value to itinerant people. I wonder when the connection between hotter, charcoal fires and superior finished pottery was made. Likely, it coincdes with sedentary, agricultural settlements.
In southern Mexico they sell chicken baked in clay, feathers, guts & all.
While riding the FFCC in the 80's, i saw a family tear one apart, even had the yolks of eggs!
Also, imagine that someone was cremated after death in their canoe that they'd been using all their life to provide for the tribe. Along the way the canoe had been repaired many times with clay to waterproof the vessel. The fire is very hot and the body/boat is vaporized, but what remains is the clay that was inside the canoe. Somewhere nearby a lone genius gets an idea...
If you fall asleep the fire cools down to under 500 °C and that wont sinter the clay. I had the same idea with birds but the more I think about it the less I believe it. You wont cook a fish at 1000 °C or just at 600 °C over hours. You would place it into glowing embers and they have 500 °C max. I think the only way are systematic heating tests or perhaps a wildfire with very high temperatures and a smart observer trying to reproduce what he has found.
I remember myself at age 7 or 8 discovering a clay deposit near a creek in my native California. Itcseemed amazing to me somehow, and ay 72 I still remember it. I must have been similar to our ancient ancestors in their time.
Great job as usual. I have learned so much from your videos and I appreciate that you are careful about not going beyond data and artifacts when you speculate on the past. The hallmark of true science is often to suspend judgment rather than theorizing haphazardly (overreaching really). Thanks again for your efforts. JimF Fairfax, VA USA
An excellent documentary full of new (to me) and valuable knowledge. Thank you for it.
This channel always saves me when I'm bored. Great job
This was a wonderfully complete, brief history of the creation of pottery. Thank You Matt for the research and production!
Mind broadening! Thank you Matt!
Um, what's the clay content of the soil? Low clay content could explain why they used stone instead.
In places where clays are readily available it's just a matter of time before people notice that it hardens when heated but in low clay content areas ceramics would most likely be introduced by trade.
Thanks Matt. Another eye opening video. It seems we need to make a map and timeline that includes all things happened in prehistory including all places discovered to understand how and why they are linked
I might start one in photoshop
@@AncientArchitects Where does that timeline map come from that you show at the end? I'd like to download it. That map already give wonderful insight because it also has a timeline of the population on earth. Often people don't realize how incredibly small the population was back then and tend to think in many millions.
great episode. keep them coming.
When someone says "pre-pottery" or "didn't have the wheel" I take it with a grain of salt. There could be any number of reasons we haven't found such things in any given area. I really appreciate this video. Thanks.
I learned lots of new stuff. Thank you.
Awesome channel,thank you so much
I wager that it was common knowledge what happened when you left common materials, such as clay, next to the fire "too long". Just like it was also common knowledge what happened when you buried seeds. And it was necessity and changing conditions that motivated them to put that pre-existing knowledge to use in ways that signal a change in the archaeological record.
OK, I'm just gonna say it - in archaeology pieces of pottery are referred to as sherds, not shards. That is pieces of glass.
Love your content, Matt. Thanks for another informative video! ❤
Thanks for watching
It’s interesting to me that early Native Americans boiled water by throwing hot stones in a basket full of water, and fish was cooked sometimes by covering the fish with river clay and putting it in a fire. It wouldn’t have been long, I am assuming, that the intuitive connection of the fish pattern in the clay after cooking it would have lent the idea of water proofing a basket and hence pottery.
Cool. Thank you Matthew.
Very interesting.
Would you make a video about Japanese Jomon period? Pottery and clay figurines of that period are absolutely fascinating.
Amazing. Thank you!
Another very informative and obviously well researched video! “my house” 😂😂 had me laughing 😆
Once again your persistent digging has brought us obscure knowledge which provokes one to re-evaluate what we thought we understood!
I sometimes like researching more obscure but important topics. I always like learning!
@@AncientArchitects Amen brother. That is why I am Subscribed to channels like yours. Love filling my head with weird knowledge, and love it even more when that weird knowledge comes in handy. Thank you!
Watching immediately!
Thanks!
Thanks for this video. I know you only use the terms used by "professionals", but I always cringe a little over such finite terms created out of the lack of evidence instead of actual evidence. Far too many times have discoveries been claimed as "the first". Challenging the static narratives is a large part of this channel, so once again, thanks!
It’s interesting to consider how important pottery was thousands of years ago.
That was fabulous!
Hooray! Another Ancient Architects video!
Enjoy!
Great video thank you.
Thanks for this I had no idea I was still convinced pottery was 8000 years old fantastic really pleased to be put straight fabulous thanks so much!
I guess you really do read the comments. Realistically how can you actually date the invention of pottery? I believe it is a relative term. If a concave stone is found naturally and used for crushing herbs and grains, is it considered to be pottery? Or perhaps this is what inspired the use of clay. It is so brittle that I am positive that it has been reinvented a few times.
Thank you for sharing this explanation. When I had asked before what was meant by Pre-Pottery. And I thanked you for the answer. But I still had trouble with how they were able to cook and eat with out some way to store and hold things. I didn't get that they made them out of stone. But it
makes sense if they were so good with carving rock and this is what they knew
that is what they used.
And the idea of making pots inside of
baskets is a great idea. I can surely see
how this was a way to start if the idea was
new to you. I have worked with clay and
made pots. So the baskets would have
given you just what you needed to get you
started. The size the shape flat or round.
Thank you so much for this explanation. I
do enjoy your videos.
I like the transition stage of the Americans where they covered a woven grass basket with pine tar so they could boil water in it. Much lighter and durable than a ceramic covered one.
All these innovations created the NeoLithic.
My favorite pre-pottery culture is Japan's Jomon (10,000 year ago). The people named after their pottery style. (cords wrapped around their pottery. The inspiration for the art style of Zelda Breath of the Wild)
Yes, was reading about them at the weekend!
Why is it that there called pre-pottery but are also named for their pottery, that’s super confusing from my uneducated perspective
@@Ps3luvr260 yeah it's super lame. A lot of the western/European history written by (and especially in) the 1800s is really dumb and racist and is just never updated/ corrected.
@@JamesFenczik Claiming it is dumb and racist is just it's own kind of dumbness. It is eurocentric and it is ok that is this way. Europeans were in a long time the only ones going out there and digging up history to make a puzzle more complete, refining the way of doing it to the way archeology works as a field all over the world today. Most of the world would be middle age central without what happened in Europe and you and me if we were even born wouldn't know crap about anything beside cooked up stories some people tell us in fancy big buildings.
@@Airwave2k2 claiming Europeans were "the only ones" is that dumb racism I'm talking about lol.
Thank you for your time and effort put into these videos, bravo!
Thanks for watching and commenting
Best of the best!
I just *knew* this whole “pre-pottery pottery” scenario was only gonna get more complicated…
i chuckled at "My House", cheers :)
Thanks, as always.
Amazing 👍
Thanks for sharing, Matt.
Interesting as usual.
What indicates that farming has occurred? Figuring that out sounds interesting too.
Pottery is heavy and only makes sense if you stay longer at one place. The alternative are sacks from leather filled with water in which you drop heated stones. To cook meat for hours would be more convenient in an oven.
Pottery needs to be heated for long hours at 500 - 1200 °C. That are already temperatures for metallurgy and glas. Ceramics wont come into existence by chance in a log fire.
Perhaps people smeared a chicken with clay to keep it juicy and had the fire heated up in a strong wind.
I guess it is possible to make a more or less watertight pot with wood ash and water. That might be the beginning of pottery.
I love this topic.
This is why I had true distain for the term "pre-pottery"!!
hi, Matt! another interesting, eye opening video. there is a comment about how pottery wasn't discovered, it was just there. no big deal. get some clay and, voila! pottery! balderdash! my 1st wife took courses in pottery and i'm hear to tell you, making a functional bowl, vase, or whatever is FAR from easy! and, you can't use just any clay with success! and, the firing process needed to be learned, either by trial and error or being taught how. even then, it isn't easy. naysayers need to attempt things before saying they are easy.
sorry, just had to get that off my chest. it really gets my goat when people downplay the acheivements of the ancients!
Lol great points, I wanted to say that pottery may just be to big a pain to make compared to stone wood or animal horn vessels. Makes me wonder how far back stone cooking utensils go. Loved you pointed out the issues of pottery thanks.
wow surprising! so many things to discover...so little time ❤️
I know the feeling
Amazing.
Humans can only go 3 days without water, making range 1.5 days away without ability to bring water, or @75 miles. Pottery is vastly superior to animal skins for this purpose. Truly an important step in exploration and migration! Peace
Massive step, agreed!
Large bird eggs
If you have to bring water with you!
I have suspected that the need to transport water efficiently with pottery predated cooking woth pottery. Nomadic proples probably used pit cooking with leaves holding their food.
Boiling water must have been vital for both sterilization and extracting Maximum food from animals. Plants such as acorns need to be heated but not necessarily in water. This can’t be done in animal skins nor any kind of water proofed basket. Stone bowls would work but hard to make, hard to heat compared to thin walled pottery. Plus imagine the hot water needs for a clan of 50 people. This means larger bowls with lids would be the ideal solution. This might be the practical driving force for pottery over stone
Thanks mate. 👍
unlike many ancient inventions its very easy to imagine how pottery was invented -
Thank You Matt
Thank you
You can see the potential arc of development. If you line a basket with clay you can carry water in it, it’s not a huge leap from there to accidental or perhaps even intentional firing. Cool :0)
Thank you.
Thank you for this educational video.
It wouldn't be surprising if the first step in the invention of pottery was the lining of bags with mud in order to transport fire from place to place, Noticing that the mud turned into a sort of stone would be the next.
It takes a certain type of soil, clay, to make pottery. You can't just take some dirt and slap it on a basket. So, a question I have is did the Gobekli Tepe region have that type, or not? This might explain it.
Pottery can be made from any type of clay tbh. Locally made pots could use clay from river beds or they would simply mine it. Certain clays were sought, however; for example medieval whiteware pottery was made from, in general, a formation called the Reading Beds - a type of pink clay found across parts of southern England. It fire white and usually had a green glaze added. Check out Cheam or Kingston ware.
Terrazzo floors & plastered skulls? I’d say YES
Basically, the finer the "dirt" is the more clay-like it becomes !
So the "finest" clay is the last to settle in water, (try it out),
So in a puddle of water, the clay is on top.
The guy who realises this is the guy who becomes the first potter !
@@Rovinman Thanks for the education provided in the reply, not only to this one but to the others.
I suspect the first "guy" to realize this about finer dirt was a "gal." The division of labor done by pre-modern societies, men tending to the hunt and women more to the home and hearth front, makes me think it was the female who first came up with ideas we now take for granted.
From pottery to weaving (textiles) and the like, I suspect it was the ladies who had the "ah HA" moment in those critical areas of our primate development over time. And no this isn't a "battle of the sexes," comment. Or shouldn't be viewed as such. It's more an acknowledgement about just how complimentary, how necessary, the two sexes are to each other.
John~
American Net'Zen
@@johncurtis920 I think you have a good point there, although the Hunter may have stepped in a puddle and got covered in clay, which was caked by the time he got back from the hunt !
But the answer is we just don't know, but I'm sure that agter the caked mud fell off the hunters foot, someone saw how dry and hard it had become, hence a container of sorts.
It's all speculation !
How long after the Sun baking and softening again, did the idea of Fire hardening appear ?
I am sure it was more than one rainy day, and a night in by the fire !
But I like the idea you propose !
I'm ALL for innovation !
Thanks as always for the amazing work. And Matty, I hate being demanding, but I really hope you can have a closer look at that ancient Czech ceramic Venus. If it's the oldest example we have of the motif, with such beautiful, confident, stylised design... Well damn, that's a mind blower in and of itself!
Pottery, ceramic figures and carved figures show that early man was much smarter than we were taught.
Indeed. They were us, and we are them. Anatomically speaking no difference. They were "modern" humans.
So it stands to reason they were just as capable as we are today, just as intelligent. They just didn't have the massive information infrastructure we have today, from which our intelligence now springs, although from their ability to work in stone it's pretty clear they had information we lack even today...
John~
American Net'Zen
Consider the fire pit. One might line it with some handy, sticky earth to help keep flames under control. The fire is kept going wherever possible, for warmth and cooking/drying various foodstuffs. It’s nearly time to move on, so the fire is allowed to die out. There is a very odd change in the lining earth, it is hard, and does not bend. Hmmmm. Interesting stuff. Perhaps a youngster, or a woman who tends the fire takes a piece or so from curiosity, fools with it, finds it doesn’t let water melt or penetrate it. ‘Hey, guys! Look at this!’ Pottery is born.
As 'your' bag starts wearing out.. turn it into a clay pot.. recycling.. something that this modern society need to do more of.
I love your videos ! You should check out Lepenski Vir and Vinca culture, they are interesting
Yes! Well aware of the Vinca - amazing culture!
We have to keep in mind vast majority of people lived on the shoreline of the oceans a shoreline during the ice age which would be under ruffly 200 feet of water now.
Wonderments of epicness!!!
👍
@@AncientArchitects So glad I guessed the clay lined basket, probly originally just for waterproofing as part of pots evolution.
Ah the simple life...just don’t break the pot else you get kicked out of the cave.
Haha
The technique of using cord wrapped paddles to decorate pottery like the vessels shown in the video may have a way to add a decorative motif related to basket made pottery but it's not certain that basket pottery was the first type made or if most pottery using cultures even made it that way. Side Note: The punctate pottery rim sherd shown in the video is exactly the same as the punctate pottery found here on the East Coast of America. Parallel evolution of the technology from Asia and America or direct contact?.. Nobody knows.
I don't know enough about Chinese pottery history to comment, but as you said, there has been no pottery found at Gobekli Tepe or the surrounding sites. Very interesting vid as always Matt....peace to ya.
Thanks for watching mate
The push and nag to subscribe kills the video.
But seriously....could stone pottery making lead humans to this level of skill with stonemasonry....
Never thought about that before
“My House” 😆
I believe that the whole Tas Tepeler region is limestone and no clay - perhaps if there had been they'd have developed pottery
interesting, thank you
Thank you
You'd think a cup would be an immediate invention.. 🤔😁
Nice..
👍
Great video mate, saw you on uncharted x podcast and found it really refreshing hearing from you. I thought ruminants refers to the way animals digest their food not hoofs?
I have to admit I’m not a biologist. I could be wrong, I went to a dictionary for a definition 😂
@@AncientArchitects The definition isn't wrong per se. But yeah rumination is about digestion. Rumination is related a to the feature of a parted stomach (cows are the mostly teached example in school). Going up the taxation class they are part of the even-toed ungulates. So you also got the ungulates in a way in it what you said. Aquatic would mean they also eaten fish. If that page you showed is an indication for the diet.
Had to reload page about 6 times to get past the 14 second no opt out ads... it's not you, been getting this so frequently I'm becoming proficient at it.
I like the 5 second ads because only with discipline can you brand yourself in that time, even tho there would be 2 ads in a row.
Any advertiser can't set their image in 5 seconds has already failed on the shelf.
You're Welcome.
Bless all plans. SF/EF
If anyone reads this I have an idea what the clay venues figurines were used for.. Once it’s pointed out it’s obvious, an “oh of course what an elegant solution to a simple problem.
Gourd containers were probably more common but just didn’t survive like pottery would
Pottery only makes sense after people developed settlements (and maybe agriculture).
It's too cumbersome and too fragile to transport (by carrying).
Concrete denial is a weird ideology to have considering that clay pottery is effectively the same thing. Would you even be able to spot 10,000 year old formed clay being different from random pieces of dirt?
I imagine the first pots were portable bathrooms to potty in, hence their name... LoL
Much obliged for this knowledge.
There is no use case for fragile pottery. Stone vessels last much longer and are multiuser. Pottery is a sign of a new caste of workers creating a surplus and making their own tools.
stuff just keeps getting older
Great video. It's quite funny that we now use the word China, based on later imports a couple of hundred years back, without ever really knowing that the real origins lie there 10's of thousands years ago.😄
Jolly good!
Is that an outdated British phrase or is it still used commonly?
(If not British please disregard)
Squirrel!”
I have my favourite cooking pots & im sure they did………… if I was moving anywhere I’d take them with me………… same as tools………… Especially tools
I committed Heresy, I watched video..........before hitting the Like button, Blasphemy!
I wonder if in the future we will be classified as post a cell phone culture.
I have some Tupperware from the 70's. I'm sure it will be around in 20k years.
I wonder why they never made pots out of that Terrazzo?
I think it's safe to say that we do not and will not know when pottery was ever invented, we can only speculate by the oldest example we have but nothing is surten
I've got a few pieces of clay pottery I found when I was a kid in SE Mississippi one is red clay with a straight lines design and the other is darker colored with a design that looks like a fish vertebrate to me. I showed them to an archeologist and she said they were at least 11,000 years old.
It’s so frustrating hearing all these threads but not knowing exactly the human story. Great video. Love this stuff
Thank you for watching 👍
@@AncientArchitects you keep putting it out and I’ll keep watching. I’d love to see a chronological timeline video of what things happened where. I’m almost convinced that Neanderthals might have had civilisations and created a lot of the stuff that sits outside the standard human timeline. I mean, why not?
Yep.