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

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9464270527 ISBN 13: 9789464270525

Publisher: Sidestone Press, 2023

Synopsis

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 crossovers 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.

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 this title

About the Author

Olivier Nieuwenhuyse Is A Humboldt Fellow At The Institut Für Vorderasiatische Archäologie (Freie Universität Berlin). Since Completing His Phd At Leiden University In 2007 He Has Conducted Extensive Fieldwork Across The Middle East. His Main Research Interests Are In The Later Prehistoric Societies Of The Ancient Near East

Reinhard Bernbeck is professor at the Institut für Vorderasiatische Archäologie at the Freie Universität Berlin. Previously, he taught at Bryn Mawr College and in the Department of Anthropology at Binghamton University.

Apart from the work in Turkmenistan reported here, he has pursued fieldwork in Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Iran, and more recently in Germany, where he has worked on sites of conflict from the last century. He has a long-standing interest in the political and ideological dimensions of archaeology, as well as in the emergence of social inequalities.

He has authored several monographs, among them Theorien in der Archäologie (1997) and recently Materielle Spuren des nationalsozialistischen Terrors (2017). He has co-edited numerous books, including Ideologies in Archaeology (with Randall H. McGuire, 2011), Subjects and Narratives in Archaeology (with Ruth Van Dyke, 2015), and Interpreting the Late Neolithic in Upper Mesopotamia (with Olivier Nieuwenhuyse, Peter M.M.G. Akkermans and Jana Rogasch, 2013).

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sidestone Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9464270527
• ISBN 13: 9789464270525
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 286
• Editor: Nieuwenhuyse Olivier P., Bernbeck Prof. Dr Reinhard, Berghuijs M.A. Koen