Abstract
Cooking ceramics represent a key example of post-harvest intensification, making foodstuffs more edible and their nutrients more bioaccessible. These can be considered an example of materialesque intensification, in that the labor is invested ahead of time in a material product that continues to provide for intensive processing. In the Old World there are two macro-regions in which pottery developed independently amongst hunter-gatherers, in Eastern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and these are compared in this chapter to highlight similar pathways of material culture and dietary evolution, as well as regional contingencies. Better documented early pottery in Japan and the Russian Far East provide a general four-phase evolutionary model of Formative ceramics, Transitional phase ceramics as they became more routine, Dispersal phase ceramics that are more geographically widespread and elaborated across forms and functions, and finally a Culinary elaboration phase of further functional differentiation when ceramics were integrated with agricultural sources of foods. We review some of the evidence for early pottery across four sub-regions of China that highlight increases in vessel size and form diversity through each regional version of these phases. We then consider the more fragmentary sequences from the Sudanese Nile Valley, Western Africa, and the Tadrart Acacus of the central Sahara. Currently, the earliest ceramics from sub-Saharan Africa suggest a northward dispersal of this technology into the Sahara and Sahel during the early Holocene. These regional sequences in Africa may represent similar phases with increasing frequency of ceramics, diversification in forms and a burst of further elaboration with spread of domesticated fauna or plant cultivation. Although there are similarities in the origins of pottery before the Neolithic as recognized by most archaeologists—associated with sedentism and food production—the Neolithic traditions differ between Africa and Eastern Asia such that we ought to think in terms of multiple Neolithics rather than ‘The Neolithic’. Parallels across regions suggest material entanglements recur to create a degree of directionality in technological evolution among regional cases of pre-Neolithic ceramics.