Firing of clay
A deliberate and repeatable irreversible transformation of matter: raw clay at 500-800 C becomes ceramic. Early fired objects are not vessels but figurines from the Gravettian sites of Moravia (Dolni Vestonice, Pavlov); ceramic vessels appear roughly ten thousand years later, among hunter-gatherers of East Asia, long before agriculture.
Firing introduces the idea of a recipe (temperature, time, atmosphere) and of the kiln, that is, control over a process and not only over a flame.
Why this date
Archaeological dating. What is dated is the firing of clay as a method (a deliberate irreversible transformation), not the appearance of pottery vessels. The earliest ceramics are the fired figurines of the Gravettian sites Dolni Vestonice and Pavlov (Moravia), c. 31-27 ka cal BP (Vandiver et al. 1989; Farbstein et al. 2012); the year is the middle of that interval converted to BCE. Vessels come much later: Xianrendong (China) c. 20-19 ka BP (Wu et al. 2012), a date that is contested (Yanshina, Sobolev 2018: 17.5-16 ka).
What it grew from
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Control of fire
prerequisite for · Confidence: high
Firing clay is physically impossible without a maintained fire: the earliest ceramic figurines of Dolni Vestonice were sintered at 500-800 C, that is, at hearth temperatures.
Link sources
- Vandiver P.B., Soffer O., Klima B., Svoboda J. «The Origins of Ceramic Technology at Dolni Vestonice, Czechoslovakia», Science 246(4933) (1989)
A firing temperature range of 500° to 800°C was measured and compared with those of hearths and kilns.
- Gowlett J.A.J. «The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process», Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 371(1696) (2016) Verified 25 Sep 2026
Eventually, fire became embedded in human behaviour, so that it is involved in almost all advanced technologies.
"Verified" means that on that day the quotation was found at the address given, word for word. No date means we have not been able to open the source yet, not that the quotation is wrong.
- Vandiver P.B., Soffer O., Klima B., Svoboda J. «The Origins of Ceramic Technology at Dolni Vestonice, Czechoslovakia», Science 246(4933) (1989)
Links under review
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Copper smelting from ore
influenced · Confidence: medium
All three sources are closed: two quotations are in the Journal of Archaeological Science (Elsevier, paywalled), the third in Antiquity (Cambridge), whose page opens but carries only the abstract while the quotation sits in the body. The first quotation also states Wertime's 1964 hypothesis, about which the authors themselves are critical.
Experience of firing ceramics (control of temperature and of the redox atmosphere, the dark-burnished ware of Vinca) gave potters skills that smelting required; without it metallurgy would have appeared later or in a different form.
Dispute: The classic hypothesis (Wertime 1964; Renfrew 1969) treats ceramic pyrotechnology as the precursor of smelting. Amicone et al. 2020, after examining 88 sherds from Belovode and Plocnik, conclude that graphite-painted pottery and metallurgy emerge at the same time and both draw on earlier experience with dark-burnished ware: "the two crafts are likely to have been generally linked, making them 'close cousins' rather than one being the precursor to the other".
Link sources
- Amicone S., Radivojević M., Quinn P.S., Berthold C., Rehren Th. «Pyrotechnological connections? Re-investigating the link between pottery firing technology and the origins of metallurgy in the Vinča Culture, Serbia», Journal of Archaeological Science 118, 105123 (2020)
Advances in pottery firing technology, which predates metallurgy in many parts of the world, have been proposed as precursors to the emergence of metal extraction (Wertime, 1964 and literature therein). According to this theory, metallurgists gained transferrable skills from potters, including the ability to reduce metal oxides (Wertime, 1964, pp. 1264-1266).
- Renfrew C. «The autonomy of the south-east European Copper Age», Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 35, p. 38 (1969)
refractory technology in the south-east European Chalcolithic had evolved sufficiently in the firing of pottery to provide the conditions required for smelting and casting of copper
- Roberts B.W., Thornton C.P., Pigott V.C. «Development of metallurgy in Eurasia», Antiquity 83(322) (2009)
The metal production process would not have been entirely novel, given that metal was preceded or paralleled by pyrotechnological activities creating other materials (e.g. ceramics) throughout Eurasia.
- Amicone S., Radivojević M., Quinn P.S., Berthold C., Rehren Th. «Pyrotechnological connections? Re-investigating the link between pottery firing technology and the origins of metallurgy in the Vinča Culture, Serbia», Journal of Archaeological Science 118, 105123 (2020)
Node sources
- Vandiver P.B., Soffer O., Klima B., Svoboda J. «The Origins of Ceramic Technology at Dolni Vestonice, Czechoslovakia», Science 246(4933), 1002-1008 (1989)
A firing temperature range of 500° to 800°C was measured and compared with those of hearths and kilns. The mechanism of sintering was impurity-initiated, liquid-phase sintering.
- Farbstein R., Radić D., Brajković D., Miracle P.T. «First Epigravettian Ceramic Figurines from Europe (Vela Spila, Croatia)», PLoS ONE 7(7): e41437 (2012) Verified 20 Sep 2026
One of the most famous Palaeolithic innovations is the ceramic technology that was used to make figurative art at Gravettian (Pavlovian) sites in Moravia, Czech Republic, c. 31,000-27,000 cal BP
- Wu X., Zhang C., Goldberg P., Cohen D., Pan Y., Arpin T., Bar-Yosef O. «Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong Cave, China», Science 336(6089), 1696-1700 (2012)
Pottery making introduces a fundamental shift in human dietary history, and Xianrendong demonstrates that hunter-gatherers in East Asia used pottery for some 10,000 years before they became sedentary or began cultivating plants.
- Yanshina O.V., Sobolev A.E. «The Earliest Pottery of Xianrendong Cave: What Do We Know About It?», 14(4) (2018) Verified 25 Sep 2026
Xianrendong is a cave site, where the World's oldest pottery was found. According to the results of the 2009 studies, its age was determined in the range of c. 17500-16000 BP.
"Verified" means that on that day the quotation was found at the address given, word for word. No date means we have not been able to open the source yet, not that the quotation is wrong.