Neolithic (‘New Stone’) Age (8.5-6.5 kya)
Hunter-gatherers depend on what nature provides. Drought or other climatic hardship restricts the size to which these populations can grow. A given area of fertile land can support far more food-producers than it can hunter-gatherers, so where farming was adopted, populations multiplied. Tending crops encouraged a settled, village way of life with craftsmen producing and bartering such artefacts as tools and pottery.
By 8500 years ago (8500 ya) some hunters had turned to pastoralism, keeping cattle, goats or sheep as ‘living larders and walking wardrobes’, each group conveniently feeding on plants indigestible to man. Pigs domesticated from wild boar emerged as useful scavengers. The main early domesticated crops were cereals and legumes in the Near East; rice, cereals and root crops in the Far East; and a range of peppers, squashes, beans and maize in the New World.
The huge arc of land stretching from Israel, through Syria and into southern Iraq is known as the Fertile Crescent. Remarkably similar early domestication sequences have been found in these areas, from the first signs of substantial settlement 10,000 years ago to the appearance of stock rearing, cereal growing, pottery, and eventually the development of towns and cities.
• Pottery
When clay dries it loses much of its water, which it regains when it is wetted. When clay is baked, extra water is lost from its molecules at ≈400°C and this cannot be replaced – the clay becomes pottery. Pottery is very useful for making containers: its raw material is common, shaping and baking are simple, and it can be given almost any form and decoration.
Although pots are fragile, their fragments (sherds), which were discarded freely, are almost indestructible. Ceramic analysis can examine its manufacture, the nature of its fabric, its surface treatment and the method of its decoration.
Pottery appeared in the Near East after 7000 BC. Combined with other evidence, the study of pottery assists the understanding of the differences, relationships and progress of the societies that produced pottery. It is a valuable marker in archaeology, much as stone tools are for earlier dates.
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