Misconceptions about pottery as part of the Neolithic "Revolution"
A Neolithic...Revolution?
For many years, the Neolithic was depicted as a sort of “package deal” of agriculture, sedentism, and pottery technology, neatly bundled into a cultural period and dubbed the “Neolithic Revolution.”1 Further investigation and new evidence has revealed that the so-called revolution was not a quick process at all, and agriculture, sedentism, and pottery technology actually emerged at different times. In this sense, it may be more appropriate to think of this period of time as the Neolithic Evolution.
The development of agriculture in China was an insidious process, spanning nearly three thousand years2. Contrary to the idea of Neolithic Revolution, and common conceptions of what it means to be an agriculturalist, evidence for village settlements actually predate agriculture.3 That is to say that people were settled for several thousand years in China before domesticated plants were systematically harvested agriculturally, and these settlements existed before domesticates began to make significant contributions to the diets of these people.
Likewise, pottery was used in China many thousands of years before village settlements, sedentism, and agriculture.4 This development was quite extensive, with many independent loci of invention and use by Pleistocene hunter-gatherers.
adventures of my lifetime: Misconceptions about pottery as part of the Neolit...: Yangshao culture pottery (c. 5000-3000 BCE). Left : Basin with painted human face excavated at Banpo, Shaanxi Province, China. On di...
How to Make Pottery
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