Whether or not foragers do have pottery depends a lot on what one
selects as one’s “ethnographic present.” Pottery was a fairly common
part of the technological repertoire of foragers worldwide until
Europeans introduced metal pots and pans, at which point many groups
abandoned the use of clay containers. For example, if one relies on
the descriptions of the San from the twentieth century, as most of us
do, the ethnographies are virtually silent on the topic of pottery.
But if one looks at the Later Stone Age archaeology of southern
Africa, or the written accounts left by the first Dutch and English
explorers to set foot in South Africa, it becomes evident that pottery
was a fairly widespread component of Bushman culinary technology
(Bollong et al. 1997; Mazel 1992; Rudner 1979). The earliest pottery
thus far known appears in Late Pleistocene hunter–gatherer sites in
eastern Russia, Japan, and China, with dates as early as ~13,000
radiocarbon years ago or up to 18,000 calibrated years ago (Boaretto
et al. 2009; Keally et al. 2004; Kuzmin 2006; Zhang 2002). Ceramics
also appear quite early in Africa, dating between 9,000 and 9,500
years ago in the central Sudan, as well as in northeast Niger and
Libya (Garcea 2006; Haaland 1992). “In most of North Africa… the
production of pottery and groundstone is independent of the origins of
food domestication. It occurred about 3,000 years earlier, dating from
around 9,000 years BP and 6,000 BP, respectively” (Garcea 2006:201).
- John D. Speth, the Paleoanthropology and Archaeology of Big Game Hunting
Other containers, made out of gourds or skins, are not preserved in the archaeological record, but are regularly used by foragers.
