No pottery at the western periphery of Europe: why was the Final Mesolithic of Britain and Ireland aceramic?

Abstract

Abstract

Source-sink dynamics drove punctuated adoption of early pottery in Arctic Europe under diverging socioecological conditions

“…To establish a series of models about the factors driving pottery adoption we examined recent work on the emergence of pottery across northern Eurasia and the circumpolar regions more generally. Various hypothesis have been proposed to account for the spread and uptake of ceramic technology amongst prehistoric hunter-gatherers (Jordan and Zvelebil, 2010a:59), as well as for the non-adoption amongst contemporary, and geographically adjacent aceramic groups (Admiraal et al, 2020;Demirci et al, 2021;Elliott et al, 2020). Production of ceramic technologies and the highmobility lifestyle led by many hunter-gatherer (HG) populations are often seen as mutually exclusive characteristics due to the high investment requirements and stationary production sequence of pottery production e an idea of deep intellectual roots and engrained in cultural evolutionary thought (Arnold, 1985:109).…”

Neolithization and Population Replacement in Britain: An Alternative View

“…Studies that employ numbers of radiocarbon dates as proxies for population size, concluding that later Mesolithic people were few in number (e.g. Bevan et al 2017), neglect the systematic underrepresentation of mobile hunter-gatherers in the radiometric record (Elliott et al 2020(Elliott et al , 1161. Similarly, there may be a growing tendency to rely on models of hunter-gatherer population derived from genomic evidence, but these may estimate the effective reproducing population rather than the census population (Matsumura & Forster 2008).…”

Prehistoric Fermentation, Delayed-Return Economies, and the Adoption of Pottery Technology

“…Within this general scheme, it is important to point out that pottery did not inevitably rise from all surplus-producing Late Pleistocene and Holocene societies; indeed many never produced pottery, including those who undoubtedly encountered it (Elliott et al 2020). Nor is it likely that increased sedentism was a prerequisite for pottery production.…”

“…It is therefore arguable whether knowledge of ceramic production predated its need; the reasons for ceramic adoption may be more complex, linked in part due to dispersal dynamics, the presence of competing technologies, and demographic considerations. Notably, many surplus-producing hunter-gatherers living along resource-rich aquatic ecotones never produced pottery, such as Mesolithic foragers of the Atlantic facade in Western Europe (Elliott et al 2020) or hunter-gatherers of the Northern Pacific coast of America (Ames and Maschner 2000).…”