Institute of Archaeology S.
2 total works
Origins of Ceramics and Hunter Gatherers of Northern Eurasia
by Peter David Jordan and Marek Zvelebil
Published 15 April 2007
Conventionally the use and origins of pottery have been associated with the emergence of the Neolithic and the advent of farming. However, we now know that there is no exclusive association between ceramic use and farming, and that pottery use amongst hunter-gatherers was far more widespread than has hitherto been recognised. It was hunter-gather societies that were responsible for the invention and dispersal of this innovation and the origins and the use of ceramics have no necessary association the advent of farming societies. Indeed, outside Europe and the Near East, farming and the use of pottery represent distinct technological traditions, operating independently from one another and having quite separate histories. The use of ceramics by hunter-gatherers appears to predate the emergence of farming by several thousand years. The book traces the origin of ceramic technology from its putative centre of origin in China and the Far East, and then trace its subsequent dispersal via hunter gatherer communities of Northern Eurasia through to Northern Europe.
Chapters assess the practical impact of this technological innovation had on forager communities, their health and diet, and the role of ceramics as a medium of symbolic expression and a focus of social relations between individuals and larger social groupings.
Chapters assess the practical impact of this technological innovation had on forager communities, their health and diet, and the role of ceramics as a medium of symbolic expression and a focus of social relations between individuals and larger social groupings.
This timely volume would assemble the work of leading anthropologists who have engaged in recent ethnographic fieldwork to explore the creation and persistence of sacred landscape geography amongst indigenous groups in the Siberian north. Why a focus on Siberian cultural landscapes? Australia, in particular, has witnessed decades of detailed research into land use amongst aboriginal communities, and these studies have highlighted the total intermeshing of kinship, culture, ritual and subsistence. Recent studies of indigenous cultural landscapes in other regions has highlighted that sacred geographies are present in all areas of the globe, although locally unique. Landscape studies represent an ideal framework for exploring the constitution of local cultures. Despite the immense size of Northern Eurasia - and the rich and diverse indigenous life-ways present there - studies of Siberian indigenous groups are notable by their almost total absence from the research (and popular) literature.