Early Farmers, Late Foragers, and Ceramic Traditions ─ On the Beginning of Pottery in the Near East and Europe

For a hundred years, anyone with even a smattering of knowledge about archaeology knew that early people stopped roaming around, settled down, planted crops, and started raising cattle before they had time-- or intelligence, maybe--to start thinking about the crockery. During the second half of the 20th century, however, stubborn evidence kept being unearthed that Mesolithic and even Palaeolithic societies had ceramic objects. The 10 papers here describe elements and examples that can no longer be dismissed as error or anomaly. Among them are the earliest use of pottery in Anatolia, relationships between pottery technology and production organization in early Neolithic southern Italy, the pottery of the Swifterbant culture in the Netherlands as an example of hunter-gatherers in transition to agriculture, and evidence and consequences of exchanging bone and antler and pottery designs between Ertebolle and Funnel-Beaker Danubian communities. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Professor Dragos Gheorghiu is an anthropologist and experimental archaeologist whose studies focus on the process of cognition, and material culture, of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic societies of South Eastern Europe. His most recent research is concerned with the reconstruction of prehistoric kilns and wattle and daub buildings. Professor Gheorghiu is the author of multiple books on archaic technologies, he is the editor and co-editor of a series of publications on pyro-technologies, and has a sustained publication activity on prehistoric material culture in Europe.