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Archaeology

Pottery spread in ancient foragers

Nature Human Behaviour volume 7, pages 169–170 (2023)Cite this article

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Although we have been able to track how cultural innovations spread among farming populations in prehistoric Europe, we know relatively little about this among European hunter-gatherers. Dolbunova et al. use a range of techniques to shed light on how the making and use of pottery spread among early-to-mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers west of the Urals.

It is worth putting this work in long-term perspective. When grand schemes of social evolution were being created by theorists such as L. H. Morgan and Sir John Lubbock in the nineteenth century, key indicators of human progress were the origin of farming and the first use of pottery vessels, which were believed to be connected to one another and to define the beginning of the Neolithic age. A tradition in the West has always emphasized the presence of farming as the key feature of the Neolithic, but in the Soviet Union Engels’s idea that pottery developed first was taken up and led to the Neolithic being defined by the appearance of pottery alone3. This has continued and has been a source of confusion ever since, because pottery did not radically change human societies and economies as agriculture did.

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Fig. 1: Hunter-gatherer pottery from the east Baltic region.

References

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  1. UCL Institute of Archaeology, London, UK

    Stephen Shennan

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  1. Stephen Shennan
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Correspondence to Stephen Shennan.

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Shennan, S. Pottery spread in ancient foragers. Nat Hum Behav 7, 169–170 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01492-7

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