Climate Change and Ceramic Innovation among Northern Hunter-Gatherers

Pottery has occupied a central role in human society for many millennia but the exact reasons for the invention and subsequent spread of the world’s earliest ceramic container traditions remain poorly researched. Once linked exclusively to the emergence of farming and settled village life, it is now becoming increasingly clear that the earliest origins of pottery were instead bound-up in a complex process of innovation and adaptation among earlier hunter-gatherer societies that extended back to the end of the last Ice Age. Why pottery appeared so early – and why first among hunter-gatherers and not farmers – continues to perplex archaeologists, but it is increasingly clear that hunter-gatherers living in the strikingly different environments of temperate, boreal and even Arctic Eurasia and Alaska had mastered the new technology within a few millennia, making it a central feature of their subsistence activities and social life. This international and inter-disciplinary collaborative project involves funding from the UK Leverhulme Trust, and partners in the Netherlands, UK, Sweden, Russia and Japan, and forms the first comprehensive contextual and comparative investigation of the emergence of pottery among northern hunter-gatherers. Current case-studies aims to understand how innovations in food processing technologies affected prehistoric hunter-gatherers living along an extended ecological transect, running from temperate southern Japan in the late Pleistocene through to maritime hunters of Arctic Chukotka and Alaska in the mid Holocene.