POttery Use from the earliest Records of Patagonia through biomolecular analysis

Project Information

POUR

Grant agreement ID: 101022577

DOI

10.3030/101022577

Project closed

EC signature date 16 March 2021

Start date 1 May 2022

End date 30 April 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 224 933,76

EU contribution

€ 224 933,76

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY OF YORK
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - POUR (POttery Use from the earliest Records of Patagonia through biomolecular analysis)

Reporting period: 2022-05-01 to 2024-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Since its birth in East Asia during the Late Pleistocene, ceramic technology has become almost universal, allowing the exploitation of new environments and fostering different kinds of cultural expressions. This worldwide relevance for human development has positioned the use of early pottery as one of the most debated topics in archaeology.
Traditional models that linked this technological breakthrough to the development of farming and sedentary lifestyles are currently being revisited, and new data from the Northern Hemisphere suggest that it would have been a hunter-gatherer innovation widespread by the processing of aquatic resources during sporadic episodes. However, some key regions of the Southern Hemisphere have remained unexplored. This is the case of the southernmost limit of pottery dispersal in America, the Patagonia region, where pottery was spread by foragers over a vast and diverse environment for 2000 years, but it remained as a scarce and low-scale technology.
What was the initial motivation that drove Patagonian foragers to use and spread this technology without engaging in intensive production? Could the stability of aquatic resources trigger this process and delineate a worldwide trend that transcends the ecological and cultural settings? By studying sherds, POUR seeks to answer this unsolved question by implementing the first large-scale systematic research on the uses of early pottery in this part of the world.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

POUR applied the latest biomolecular analysis on pottery sherds and data interpretation methods. We first took pottery powder samples from sherds across different Patagonian environments to apply chemical treatments to release lipids and other biomolecules that are preserved in their clay matrix. We then compared our samples with data from modern foodstuffs to be able to estimate the potential resources cooked or processed in the pots. Our results show that the early pottery in Patagonia is dominated by mixtures of plant oils and animal fats, being the aquatic resources the most infrequent. These results are also aligned with the overall wide spectrum of the Patagonian hunter-gatherer diet. Opening a new debate about its significance as a technological breakthrough, the spreading of pottery was not linked to the effective exploitation of one type of resource, and it did not radically change the overall Patagonian foodways.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Not applicable.

POUR_Summary