“Vases and shards ...the true alphabet of archeologists in every country"
Sir William Flinders Petrie, archeologist
As applies to all early inventions, we do not know the name of the man or woman who invented pottery. No first potter carved his or her name or initials in the base of a pot to claim first prize. However, it has long been assumed that whoever the creative person was, he or she would have lived somewhere in the Near East of Asia. It was therefore something of an archeological shock when, in the 1960s, pots dating to around 10,000 B.C.E. were discovered on the Far Eastern side of Asia, thousands of miles away at Nasunahara on the island of Kyusu in Japan. These pots, found in caves, were made by nomadic hunter-gatherers, rather than settled farmers or urban dwellers. Just as important, the pots were made by firing or heating the clay to harden it, suggesting that these people had knowledge of advanced technologies.
The significance of the first Japanese pots is that they predate^ the first pots made in the Near East by around 1,000 years. Those pots, found in Iran, were made by drying the clay in the sun in order to harden it, a far more primitive technology than firing the clay. The Japanese pots have a round base and widen gently to a ridged top and a rounded, incised rim.
They are known as Incipient Jomon, because they are the forerunners of the Jomon or "cord-marked" vessels developed in Japan around 9000 B.C.E. These later pots had pointed bases and were made by building up coils of clay into the desired shape. The patterns of the cord-marked pots were often quite complex, suggesting that they were intended for ritual or funerary use rather than for such everyday uses as cooking and storage.
