FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF EARLY NEOLITHIC RUSSIAN POTTERY TECHNOLOGY

Michela Spataro

doi:10.17816/snv20153214

Abstract

Ceramics appeared in southern Russia at about the same time as in southern Europe, at ca. 6000 cal BC, but whilst pottery was introduced into southern Europe, together with plant and animal domesticates, from southwest Asia, early Neolithic pottery in eastern Europe was probably developed locally by hunter-gatherers, or derived from other pre-agricultural societies in northern Eurasia. In this paper, four sherds from four different regions of central and southern Russia are analysed using the same methods previously employed in two large-scale research programmes on early Neolithic pottery from the Adriatic and the central Balkans. The four pots were made with different tempering agents and were generally low-fired, but while they may represent different technological traditions to the southern European pottery, the overall technical quality of the hunter-gatherer pottery is no less developed than that of the early farmers.

Highlights

Pottery has often been equated to cultural groups, in particular in prehistoric archaeology (e.g. Childe 1929)
Ceramics appeared in southern Russia at about the same time as in southern-Europe, at ca. 6000 cal BC (Piezonka 2015), but the first potters in the two regions relied on very different subsistence strategies
Mesolithic subsistence economies in eastern Europe were based on exploiting wild resources, fish – just as in the Mesolithic of the Iron Gates region of the central Balkans – but unlike in the Balkans, the adoption of pottery seems to have reinforced existing subsistence economies

Summary

Introduction

Pottery has often been equated to cultural groups, in particular in prehistoric archaeology (e.g. Childe 1929). Sample VAR01 from Varfolomeevskaya has a fabric which is brown on one of the surfaces of the sherd and reddish in the interior, some scattered, mainly fine quartz inclusions, with very few coarse quartz inclusions (>5%: up to 0.9×0.6 mm), occasional clay pellets (some do not contain inclusions and some include quartz and mica lamellae), occasional very fine lithic inclusions, abundant and poorly-sorted shell fragments, up to 10 mm long (see Figure 5 left).

Results

Conclusion