This book presents up-to-date perspectives on pre-farming innovations through material practices, resource intensification, and emerging technologies, particularly pottery manufacture. It includes original studies on the earliest pottery productions among foragers from different parts of the world based on first-hand excavations and laboratory analyses. Its broad geographic scope includes Northern and Central Europe, Eastern Asia (different regions in China), Northern, Western, and Southern Africa, and southeastern North America, comprising parts of the world previously ignored (different regions in Africa) and extending beyond the Old World, i.e., North America. It also takes into account the differing chronologies of the emergence of pottery before food production, which are not limited to the late Pleistocene and early Holocene, but extend as late as the middle Holocene (e.g., in Southern Africa). This volume offers a fresh and still unexplored, global intercultural and interactive discussion on the emergence of pottery. By mapping the latest findings and variety of methodological approaches, it intends to capture both variability and common denominators of the cultural processes between the end of the Pleistocene and the early/mid-Holocene in which the production and use of pottery played a significant role among hunter-gatherers. This book is a fundamental contribution to the understanding of the role of material practices in cultural transformations in late prehistory worldwide and to the debate on how local narratives mirror different social identities, meanings, and/or functions depending on the specific economic context, settlement system, and cultural landscape. It emphasizes how transformative technologies can potentially create radical changes in the way human populations live and interact with each other. Ultimately, this volume contains valuable reflections and expectations for the future of worldwide pottery research among foragers.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1. Introduction; D’Ercole G., Garcea E. A. A., Varadzinová L. and Varadzin L.- Chapter 2. Pre-Younger Dryas pottery manufacturing techniques and behaviours: Comparative cases from Tanegashima Island, southern Japan; Iizuka, F., Vandiver, P..- Chapter 3. Maritime Expansion, Pottery Technology, and Crafting Identities: the emergence and use of pottery by coastal hunter-gatherer-fishers of Korea and Russian Far East; Jangsuk, K., Seong, C..- Chapter 4. Taken at the Flood: Catastrophic landscape change and the emergence of ceramics in Eastern Siberia; Hommel, P..- Chapter 5. Review Paper (TBA) Jordan, P. D..- Chapter 6. Could the invention of pottery have western roots?; Yanshina, O..- Chapter 7. On the emergence of pottery vessel technology: does residue analysis have the answers?; Heron, C., Craig, O..- Chapter 8.  Container cultures in hunter-gatherer societies of North Eurasia: Deciphering functions, roles and meanings; Piezonka, H..- Chapter 9. Why pottery? – an Eastern Fennoscandian view on the beginning of ceramics production; Pesonen, P., Papakosta, V.. - Chapter 10. Ceramisation of hunter-gatherers in north-central Europe; Nowak, M..- Chapter 11. The beginning of Pottery Production in Northeast India;  Sharma, S..- Chapter 12. Intensification and ritualization of the manipulation of staples along the steps to food production in Eastern Anatolia; Balossi Restelli, F..- Chapter 13. Pots among foragers: Early Holocene Ceramic Production in the Tadrart Acacus; Di Lernia, S., Rotunno, R.- Chapter 14. Four thousand years of ceramics by foragers in the Jebel Sabaloka, Middle Nile Valley (Sudan); Garcea, E.A.A., D’Ercole, G., McCool, J-P, Varadzin, L., Varadzinová, L..- Chapter 15. Boiling energy: socioecological and spiritual dimensions of pottery emergence among southern African foragers; Stewart, B..- Chapter 16. Post-harvest intensification and Pottery Pre-Neolithics: parallel innovations of endo-cuisine in Asian and African hunter-gatherers; Fuller, D. Q..- Chapter 17. Doing things from the beginning: new data on the independent invention of pottery in Amazonian shellmounds; Pugliese, F..- Chapter 18. Cultural transformations through material practice: early pottery technologies among foragers in global perspective: is there a common denominator?; D’Ercole G., Garcea E. A. A., Varadzinová L. and Varadzin L.