Containers of Change: Ancient Container Technologies from Eastern to Western Asia

Across Western Asia, the astonishing increase in the availability of durable ceramic containers in the seventh millennium BCE had significant societal repercussions – so much so that vital social, economic, and symbolic activities became dependent upon the availability of pottery containers. These early ceramic containers, however, established themselves alongside flourishing pre-existing container traditions, with vessels made in a wide range of materials including clay, bitumen, basketry, leather, wood, and stone. How did prehistoric people respond to the emergence of containers as a key factor in their lives? Building on Olivier Nieuwenhuyse's rich scholarly legacy, this volume brings together 18 papers by leading scholars in the field of container technology, discussing cases from eastern Asia to Africa, but with a focus on prehistoric Western Asia. Looking not just at pottery but also explicitly beyond, the contributions consider and address the cross-overs of different kinds of raw materials for containers and their crafting; the multiplicity of temporal scales in the production, use and discard of pottery; the social anchoring of vessels' use and deposition as evident in their specific contexts; and local as well as regional variations in early pottery. 52 colour, 45 b/w illustrations

Table of Contents:
Preface Reinhard Bernbeck and Koen Berghuijs   The ultimate black box – an introduction Olivier Nieuwenhuyse†   Thinking inside the mask Clive Gamble   Containing the flow: Çatalhöyük Ian Hodder   Clay, enamel & plastic. Three ethnographic studies on diversity and innovation in container usage Hans Peter Hahn   Just an everyday story of pots? Thinking through the controversies, materialities, and interdependencies of initial pottery and organic containers in the East Mediterranean Peter Tomkins   Thinking inside the pot – Improving organic residue analysis Bonnie Nilhamn   Early pottery in Upper Mesopotamia Marie Le Mière   Imagined Inceptions: of pottery and basketry in the Upper Mesopotamian late Neolithic Koen Berghuijs and Olivier Nieuwenhuyse†   Alternating mediums? The introduction of pottery to the southern Levant and its impact on the production of stone vessels: Sha‘ar Hagolan as a case study Danny Rosenberg and Yosef Garfinkel   Early pottery in the Southern Levant and beyond Kevin Gibbs   A view from the northern forests: container technologies of boreal hunter-gatherers Henny Piezonka   The affordances of portable containers in early village societies in the Kopet Dag region Susan Pollock   Containers of collective memories. A biographic-contextual approach to the chlorite vessels of the 10th millennium BCE of northern Mesopotamia Marion Benz   Containers for spirits: symbolic meaning of early pottery and stone vessels discovered in Tell el-Kerkh Akira Tsuneki   Clay containers and mobility in the final stage of Neolithisation: storage bins and the earliest pottery at Tell el-Kerkh, northwest Syria Takahiro Odaka   Immovable and movable containers: evidence from the Syrian Euphrates in the mid-8th millennium cal. BCE Anna Bach Gómez, Adrià Breu Barcons, Miquel Molist and Walter Cruells   Lifting the lid on the materiality of containing and retrieving Carl Knappett   Container cultures: a synthesis Reinhard Bernbeck

About the Author :
Olivier Nieuwenhuyse (1966-2020) was an archaeologist and expert in the field of Western Asian prehistoric ceramics. At the time of his untimely death, he was a Humboldt Fellow at the Institut für Vorderasiatische Archäologie (Freie Universität Berlin). He was the author of numerous articles on Late Neolithic ceramics and (co-)editor of Climate and Cultural Change in Prehistoric Europe and the Near East (2016), Painting Pots, Painting People (2017) and Relentlessly Plain (2018). Olivier conducted fieldwork in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, and, most recently, Iraqi Kurdistan. Reinhard Bernbeck is Professor of Western Asian archaeology at the Freie Universität Berlin and professor emeritus of Anthropology at Binghamton University. His interests include the prehistory of Iran, archaeological manifestations of social and material inequality, economic exploitation and ideological dimensions of archaeological practice. Koen Berghuijs holds a B.A. in Archaeology and an M.A. in Archaeology of the Near East from Leiden University. A former student of the late Olivier Nieuwenhuyse, Koen has published on (Late) Neolithic ceramics and basketry remains from various sites in Syria and Iraq and on more recent petroglyphs from the Jordanian Black Desert. He has participated in several survey and excavation projects in the Netherlands, Jordan, and Oman.