Pottery

Ceramics is one of the most ancient industries going back thousands of years.

Once humans discovered that clay could be found in abundance and formed into objects by first mixing with water and then firing,
a key industry was born.

The oldest known ceramic artifact is dated as early as 28,000 BCE (BCE = Before Common Era), during the late Paleolithic period.

It is a statuette of a woman, named the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, from a small prehistoric settlement near Brno, in the Czech Republic.

In this location, hundreds of clay figurines representing Ice Age animals were also uncovered near the remains of a horseshoe-shaped kiln.

The first examples of pottery appeared in Eastern Asia several thousand years later.

In the Xianrendong cave in China, fragments of pots dated to 18,000-17,000 BCE have been found.

It is believed that from China the use of pottery successively spread to Japan and the Russian Far East region,
where archeologists have found shards of ceramic artifacts dating to 14,000 BCE.

Source: Ceramics