Crafted by Sally Coulthard

Author:Sally Coulthard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Quadrille Publishing Ltd
Published: 2019-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

They already had everything they needed. Water was transported in wood containers and woven baskets worked perfectly well for storing and carrying food. It’s telling that, when Europeans settlers did bring ceramics and glass to Australia, the indigenous people found their own ways to use them, including turning broken shards into spear points and cutting tools.

Early pots were simple but it’s important to recognise just how much knowledge prehistoric potters would have needed to make and successfully fire pottery. First, the potter would have needed to find a source of suitable local clay. He or she would have also known that, to stop the pot cracking when it was fired, it was a good idea to add a handful of sand, crushed bone or shell to the mix. The potter would have also been required to build and maintain a bonfire or fire pit hot enough to ‘cook’ the pot, not just dry it out – clay only starts to change its chemical composition at about 500°C and sudden changes in the bonfire’s temperature could cause the pot to crack. Our prehistoric crafters would have also worked out that pottery vessels with rounded, bag-like bottoms were less likely to crack than pots with hard angles, and so took great pains to smooth off or decorate the outside of their work as an extra flourish.

DID YOU KNOW?

Japan’s oldest pottery is around 16,500 years old and called ‘Jomon’, which means ‘rope patterned’; makers would press ROPE into the soft clay to make their pots look like WOVEN baskets. Most Jomon vessels were used for boiling and cooking, but recent research has discovered that these early potters also used their pots to store the dead bodies of very young children.

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