The Pottery Age - A Turning Point in History
By Anthony Moschetti
The history of us humans is often categorized by the materials we use. You have the Stone Age, the Bronze age and the Iron Age. But in between the Stone Age the Bronze Age, we need to insert another age, the Pottery Age. Turning clay into pottery was the first time we took a material found in nature, clay and turned it into something different and useful, pottery. Without pottery and the techniques that we learned to create it the Bronze and Iron Age could not have happened. Before we could do that, we needed fire. We began to use fire sometime during the Stone Age. First it was probably as we found it when caused by lightning but eventually we learned to create fire on demand. I'm sure our first use was for cooking meat. As the first source of energy that we controlled, it was necessary for all that followed.
The Stone age is a period of time when humans only used natural materials as they found them. Wood, animal skins, and stone are some of the materials that humans adapted to their use in that time period.. An example would be a spear with a wooden shaft and a stone arrow shaped tip. Some animal product like gut string might be used to tie the spear tip to the shaft. A wooden club can be improved by attaching a stone head and properly shaped it becomes an ax. Bows and arrows can also be made using stone wood and animal products. You can make sharpened stone tools for many uses. They can shape wood into many other useful objects.
One of the most important and unrecognized advances of civilization was when we learned to make pottery. It's the first time we learned to take a natural material that was relatively useless and transform it into something useful. Now we were out of the Stone Age. From now on the advance of civilization was marked by how we learned to transform natural materials into different and more useful forms. Clay is found abundantly in nature. As a boy I found clay in and around a brook, where I used to play. This clay was wet enough so that it could be worked into shapes just as I found it. When you dry the clay, it becomes solid. However, it is not very strong and if it gets wet again it falls apart. But fire it at a high enough temperature and it changes it's properties. It becomes strong, waterproof and very useful. It becomes pottery.
The temperatures need to fire pottery are higher than you would normally find in a cooking fire. Maybe the first discoveries of making fired ceramics was made by clay objects falling into very hot cooking fires. We learned over time to make hotter fires and to contain these fires in kilns to make them even hotter. The first kilns were just dug into the earth but as we learned to make brick, also a fired clay object, more elaborate kilns were built. The age of metals was not only made possible with the use of fired ceramic pots and bricks but also by the kilns and furnaces we developed to fire these ceramic objects.
Most of my career in science was working in the field of material science, so I am aware of the importance of ceramics to the advance of civilization and it's continuing contributions. This article is written to make people aware of the importance of ceramics to civilizations beginnings. I will be writing other articles on technical ceramics and it's importance to us today. I will be putting them together to create a new knowledge section on my knowledge website tonyknows
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