The impact of environmental change on the use of early pottery by East Asian hunter-gatherers.

ABSTRACT: The invention of pottery was a fundamental technological advancement with far-reaching economic and cultural consequences. Pottery containers first emerged in East Asia during the Late Pleistocene in a wide range of environmental settings, but became particularly prominent and much more widely dispersed after climatic warming at the start of the Holocene. Some archaeologists argue that this increasing usage was driven by environmental factors, as warmer climates would have generated a wider range of terrestrial plant and animal resources that required processing in pottery. However, this hypothesis has never been directly tested. Here, in one of the largest studies of its kind, we conducted organic residue analysis of >800 pottery vessels selected from 46 Late Pleistocene and Early Holocen

SUBMITTER: Lucquin A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6077741 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature