Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong Cave, China
Pots and Crocks
The invention of pottery allowed for more secure storage of food than was provided by baskets or hide pouches, and the vessels could also be used in cooking. The earliest pottery has been thought to have appeared in China and Japan ∼18,000 years ago, several thousands of years before the advent of agriculture. Wu et al. (p. 1696); see the Perspective by Shelach) have now dated broken pieces of pottery from a cave in China, the earliest of which date to ∼20,000 years ago, the time of the Last Glacial Maximum. Scorch marks on many pieces imply that the pottery was used in cooking.
Abstract
The invention of pottery introduced fundamental shifts in human subsistence practices and sociosymbolic behaviors. Here, we describe the dating of the early pottery from Xianrendong Cave, Jiangxi Province, China, and the micromorphology of the stratigraphic contexts of the pottery sherds and radiocarbon samples. The radiocarbon ages of the archaeological contexts of the earliest sherds are 20,000 to 19,000 calendar years before the present, 2000 to 3000 years older than other pottery found in East Asia and elsewhere. The occupations in the cave demonstrate that pottery was produced by mobile foragers who hunted and gathered during the Late Glacial Maximum. These vessels may have served as cooking devices. The early date shows that pottery was first made and used 10 millennia or more before the emergence of agriculture.
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References and Notes
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Published In
Science
Volume 336 | Issue 6089
29 June 2012
29 June 2012
Copyright
Copyright © 2012, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 3 January 2012
Accepted: 1 May 2012
Published in print: 29 June 2012
Acknowledgments
We thank the State Administration of Cultural Heritage of China for permission to carry out this project and the Jiangxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology for their support, in particular C. Fan and G. Zhou. W. Yan (Peking University) and B. Wang (Cultural Relics Bureau, Wannian, Jiangxi) provided assistance and information concerning the earlier excavations. We also thank S. Liu (Jiangxi Provincial Institute) for assistance. Detailed descriptions of the stratigraphy and the pottery fragments are in (17). We thank K. Liu and X. Ding for the atomic mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon measurements. The American School of Prehistoric Research (Peabody Museum, Harvard University) supported the fieldwork and, in part, the preparation of the samples for microscopic analysis. P.G. is grateful to the NSF (grant no. 0917739) for partial support of this project. W.X., Z.C., and O.B.-Y. contributed to conceiving the project and organizing the fieldwork. P.G. and T.A. analyzed the micromorphology of the thin sections. W.X. and P.Y. conducted the dating of the new radiocarbon samples. W.X., O.B.-Y., P.G., Z.C., and D.C. prepared the paper. The authors declare no competing financial interests. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to O.B.-Y. and X.W. ([email protected]).
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