Periodic Reporting for period 1 - POUR (POttery Use from the earliest Records of Patagonia through biomolecular analysis)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-05-01 bis 2024-04-30
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.
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.
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.