Abstract
This article summarizes my experimental and archaeological research about the earliest pottery in Northern Germany and Denmark, belonging to the Erteblle culture, a Late Mesolithic hunter-gatherer-fisher culture. I will present firing and cooking experiments with copies of Erteblle pottery and how a reference collection of experimental food crusts can be used to understand issues of radiocarbon reservoir effects and stable isotope measurements in food crusts. It will be shown that cooking food resources with a reservoir age, such as marine or freshwater fish, leads to the same reservoir age in the pottery. The results from the experiments will be compared to the archaeological record. I will discuss the implications of the experimental studies for radiocarbon dating of archaeological pottery, and for studies of style and function of ceramics.
Highlights
Pottery is one of the most important materials in archaeological research
Soot in and on the clay matrix can introduce an old wood effect; plant remains, which are classified as temper, might originate from the clay pit and be much older than the date of pottery production [4]; carboncontaining compounds can enter the pottery during burial; and, charred food remains on the sherds and absorbed lipids can originate from food resources introducing reservoir effects
We found that thickwalled pointed-base pottery requires long periods for drying
Summary
Pottery is one of the most important materials in archaeological research. Pottery was an every-day product, produced in great amounts and for various purposes, from storage over food preparation to burial and rituals. As Hayashida [1] remarks, “There may be many ways to make a sturdy cooking pot given available materials but the particular clays chosen and the techniques used to form, finish, and fire the vessels are linked to such diverse factors as the organization of the potters, their social identity, the perception of different raw materials and fuels, and the integration of pottery-making with other activities” This variability makes it possible to establish methods of typological dating, assuming that different pieces of pottery, looking the same and made and decorated in the same way, are contemporaneous. Plants and animals from the sea, lakes and rivers can have radiocarbon ages which are hundreds to thousands of years older than the “true age” of these samples In case those resources were prepared in the pottery, their reservoir effect is transferred to the food residues on the sherds [5]. The younger ages of charcoal samples have been explained with the assumption that these charcoal pieces really are younger and have been anthropogenically or naturally mixed into the layers in which the pottery was found [18]
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