Apr 29 (haaretz.com) - About 14,000 years ago, prehistoric hunter-gatherers in southern Japan were making pottery. There are no signs whatsoever that the late Pleistocene inhabitants of Tanegashima Island had begun to settle down and grow food. They were foragers, hunter-gatherers and fishers, not farmers.
Once, it had been assumed that pottery didn’t predate farming. For one thing, clay pots are fragile. For another, they’re heavy, and if one is a nomadic hunter-gatherer, one doesn’t want to lug about heavy loads of delicate items. (Beasts of burden wouldn’t be domesticated for another 10,000 years.) Third, making pottery requires at least several days of staying put. You knead the raw clay, ridding it of air bubbles that would cause the pot to explode during firing; you shape it into the desired form; then you let it dry – at least for days, often more – before firing it. If you fire it wet, it will crack. So hunter-gatherers on the move were not thought to have developed pottery.
Except they did. It has now been amply shown that pottery preceded farming in eastern Asia, and now a geochemical analysis published in March in PLOS One again puts the lie to the potting-farmer with unusually confident dating of clay bowls and plates on Tanegashima Island to around 14,000 years ago – long preceding the end of the Ice Age or advent of agriculture or animal husbandry.
The vessels, discovered and excavated by the Kagoshima Prefectural Archaeology Center and now analyzed by lead author Fumie Iizuka of the University of California with Jeffrey Ferguson of the University of Missouri and Masami Izuho of of Tokyo Metropolitan University, are apparently among the earliest pottery in the world.
They are associated with the Incipient Jomon culture, which spanned from 14,000 to 13,500 years to 12,800 years ago. (The final phase of the Jomon culture was 300 B.C.E.)
Eleven Incipient Jomon sites have been identified on that island. One is Sankakuyama, which had been occupied from the Incipient Jomon until about 1,700 years ago.
Despite being pre-agricultural, the Incipient Jomon was marked by population increase, especially in Tanegashima. It was a time of global climate change and gradually rising sea levels as the Ice Age wound down. As the waters rose, Tanegashima became isolated, cut off from Kyushu, about 14,300 years ago. ...continue reading
