The pots of winter

This morning I got a few notes about the University of York, finding different cuisines in the hunter-gatherers of Baltic Europe. They found this via pottery. I think pottery and cuisine-types are design-patterns, so count as language; but I'll let that slide for now. The Yorkies note that hunter-gatherers don’t normally do ceramics. Which makes this interesting.

And that’s true… for the PALAEO-lithic. Here, though, the span is the 4000s BC… Neolithic. By this era plenty of ceramic-using farmers had made their homes not far to the south, in the Balkans. Germany too. And Britain.

This to me looks like Black Robe; if you’ve seen that, and you owe it to yourself to see that. Hurons and Mohawks along (what the French call) the Saint Lawrence were a hunter society, at a time when Massachusetts Bay was rife with farming villages. But even the hunters had regular “camps” – which were like Roman castrae, fenced off with wooden stakes. Each “tribe” had its territory wherein to hunker down and defend the women.

In that light, the “hunter gatherers” could make pottery – cheap, quick pottery – and use it over however-long they were going to stay in that territory. When the weather got better and they didn’t need the palisade anymore, they just discarded the pots to return to nomadism.

SOURCE 12/27/22: Caspian, 5000s BC.