Who invented clay

Maybe they also used pottery jars to preserve fish by fermenting it. From Brazil, people gradually began using pottery further north.

The fish-eating ancestors of the Cherokee and other Mississippians in what is now Florida and Georgia knew how to make pottery by about BC. People on the Pacific side of South America started to make pottery about the same time.

The use of pottery also spread west from East Asia, reaching Mesopotamia and the Eastern Mediterranean, and then North Africa , around BC , near the beginning of the Neolithic period there. West Asian people may have started to make pottery as a way to store grain when they started farming. But they also used their pots to make fermented fish sauce. Pottery reached Greece about BC.

This is a little platform made of wood that you build the pot on. You can turn the platform around so that instead of having to walk around your pot you can sit still and turn the pot around.

In the hands of someone who is good at using it, the slow wheel makes potting a lot faster. Central American people also invented the slow wheel. The Zapotec were using it to make pottery, maybe by around BC. The Zapotec kept right on using the slow wheel, but by BC , almost all potters in Europe, Asia, and North Africa were using the fast wheel instead.

The fast wheel is also a platform, but one which spins on an axle , like a top. You can start it spinning with a push or a kick, and then draw the pot gradually out of the lump of clay.

This was the first use of a wheel , even before carts had wheels. Ajax kills himself Vase by Exekias, ca. Using the fast wheel, a good potter can make a pot every minute or so, and all of them almost exactly the same. To make pottery even cheaper, often the people who made the pots were children as their small fingerprints show or enslaved , or enslaved children.

The Yamnaya , migrating at this time into Greece and Italy and China , brought the idea of the fast wheel with them to all of those places. From the beginning, people used pottery as a way of constructing their social identity , or showing who they were and how they were different from other people.

Many of the designs used on pottery were borrowed from cloth , which was also used to identify people of one group or another. Greek pottery is very different from West Asian pottery of the same time, and both of them are different from Egyptian pottery , or Chinese pottery. Etruscan pottery is different too, but similar to Greek pottery in many ways. People used clay to make all kinds of things besides dishes: baby baths, high chairs, potty seats , bellows , crucibles , cooking pots , water pipes , and marbles.

When this pottery broke, people used it for all sorts of things: to write on like paper, as voting ballots , for game pieces , to make tile floors or coffins for the dead, as grit to mix with clay and water to make more pottery, to wipe their butts, or to mix with powdered lime and water to make cement.

Early pottery in south China. Asian Perspectives 49 1 A pottery workshop with flint tools on blades knapped with copper at Nausharo Indus Journal of Archaeological Science Resource intensification in the Late Upper Paleolithic: a view from southern China. Journal of Archaeological Science 36 4 American Antiquity 66 4 Exploration of early rice farming in China. Quaternary International 1 Journal of Archaeological Science 32 7 The earliest high-fired glazed ceramics in China: the composition of the proto-porcelain from Zhejiang during the Shang and Zhou periods c.

Journal of Archaeological Science 38 9 Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance.

Eating clay long-term can cause low levels of potassium and iron. It might also cause lead poisoning, muscle weakness, intestinal blockage, skin sores, or breathing problems. Clay is found almost everywhere in the world.

It is formed by the action of wind and water on rocks over thousands of years. The rocks change in both chemical and physical ways. Self-hardening clay, also known as air-dried or non-firing clay, is a direct modeling material that cures naturally and does not require mold making and casting to achieve a finished piece.

In addition, this modeling clay does not need to be fired in a kiln. Pottery clay is mined from the Earth and ground into a powder. Clay comes from the ground, usually in areas where streams or rivers once flowed.

It is made from minerals, plant life, and animals—all the ingredients of soil. Firing is the process of bringing clay and glazes up to a high temperature. People first began to fire clay in China and Japan about BC. Probably they started by lining baskets with clay so they would hold water better, and then they started leaving off the basket and just making clay containers.

They may have used these early clay pots to ferment fish, or maybe to make beer, or both. Neanderthals were, however. Evidently, Neanderthals had worked out a technology for tar manufacture that did not involve the use of ceramics — something that until very recently modern humans have failed to do. The discovery also prompted a new set of speculations about the cognitive abilities of the hominid species. Eating clay long-term can cause low levels of potassium and iron.

It might also cause lead poisoning, muscle weakness, intestinal blockage, skin sores, or breathing problems. Clay is a very common substance. The invention of pottery and ceramics marked the advent of the New Stone Age in China around 6, years ago.