Pottery reaches the Near East
Fired clay containers arrive late in the Fertile Crescent, long after farming.
- When
- Known to
- ± 300 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Pottery has existed since the Late Pleistocene in East Asia, but the Near East farms for two thousand years without it, using stone bowls, baskets and lime plaster instead. Ceramic vessels appear there around 7000 BCE and spread rapidly. They matter for storage against pests and damp, for boiling as a cooking method, and — for archaeologists — because their styles change fast and break often, making potsherds the finest-grained dating tool available for most of prehistory.