Abstract
The introduction of pottery vessels to Europe has long been seen as closely linked with the spread of agriculture and pastoralism from the Near East. The adoption of pottery technology by hunter–gatherers in Northern and Eastern Europe does not fit this paradigm, and its role within these communities is so far unresolved. To investigate the motivations for hunter–gatherer pottery use, here, we present the systematic analysis of the contents of 528 early vessels from the Baltic Sea region, mostly dating to the late 6th–5th millennium cal BC, using molecular and isotopic characterization techniques. The results demonstrate clear sub-regional trends in the use of ceramics by hunter–gatherers; aquatic resources in the Eastern Baltic, non-ruminant animal fats in the Southeastern Baltic, and a more variable use, including ruminant animal products, in the Western Baltic, potentially including dairy. We found surprisingly little evidence for the use of ceramics for non-culinary activities, such as the production of resins. We attribute the emergence of these sub-regional cuisines to the diffusion of new culinary ideas afforded by the adoption of pottery, e.g. cooking and combining foods, but culturally contextualized and influenced by traditional practices.
Highlights
In Western European archaeological literature, the production of pottery for processing and storing foods has long been regarded as the inevitable consequence of prehistoric farming [1]
The proposed appearance of Mesolithic pottery at Dąbki as early as ca 4850/4700 cal BC [40] is difficult to sustain, given the results of organic residue analysis presented in this paper, which shows that most of the foodcrusts at Dąbki are composed of carbon from an aquatic source and subject to a significant reservoir effect; most, if not all of the material sampled may date to the second half of the 5th millennium BC
84% of the samples yielded interpretable amounts of lipids, with lipids well preserved in charred surface deposits especially those from waterlogged sites
Summary
In Western European archaeological literature, the production of pottery for processing and storing foods has long been regarded as the inevitable consequence of prehistoric farming [1]. In Eastern Europe and Western Siberia, the use of pottery among hunter–gatherer societies, established along major river basins (e.g. the Ob’, Volga and Don rivers) [5,6,7], is well attested, and here, in contrast to the Western conception, is regarded as the innovation that defined the start of the Neolithic itself These Eastern ‘Neolithic’ hunter–gatherer ceramic traditions might have influenced prehistoric hunter–gatherers in present-day Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belarus (including the Narva and Neman cultures) who began producing pottery by the mid-6th millennium cal BC [8,9,10]. Other evidence of prehistoric pottery use by hunter– gatherers is attested worldwide such as in the Americas and in Africa (e.g. [2,11,12,13])
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