Ceramics in Circumpolar Prehistory: Technology, Lifeways and Cuisine

Peter Jordan · Kevin Gibbs

Mar 2019 · Cambridge University Press

About this eBook

Throughout prehistory the Circumpolar World was inhabited by hunter-gatherers. Pottery-making would have been extremely difficult in these cold, northern environments, and the craft should never have been able to disperse into this region. However, archaeologists are now aware that pottery traditions were adopted widely across the Northern World and went on to play a key role in subsistence and social life. This book sheds light on the human motivations that lay behind the adoption of pottery, the challenges that had to be overcome in order to produce it, and the solutions that emerged. Including essays by an international team of scholars, the volume offers a compelling portrait of the role that pottery cooking technologies played in northern lifeways, both in the prehistoric past and in more recent ethnographic times.

About the author

Peter Jordan is Director of the Arctic Centre and holds the Chair in Arctic Studies at the University of Groningen. He is a specialist in Circumpolar hunter-gatherers and has published widely on the technology and lifeways of northern peoples past and present, particularly in Siberia. His recent books include: Ceramics before Farming (2010), Landscape and Culture in Northern Eurasia (2010), Technology as Human Social Tradition (2014) and The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers (2014).

Kevin Gibbs is Assistant Researcher at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include early pottery technology and use, hunter-gatherer archaeology, and the Neolithic period. His recent research has been published in Nature, PNAS and Antiquity.