The presence of functional vessels of fired clay ceramics, pottery means that archaeologists worldwide have access to one of the most useful tools for analyzing cultural evolution and change, agricultural practices, human settlement patterns, exchange of trade of goods, and even religious belief systems and their symbolism. Unlike chipped, ground or carved stone, which are reductive techniques (beginning with a larger piece of raw material that is worked down to a smaller final form, and in which any mistake in the process often results in breakage that obliges the artisan to start anew), the making of pottery is an additive process.

The oldest known pottery is found in Japan s Jomon culture, and dates roughly to 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. It is unslipped (a slip is a coat of fine clay applied in liquid form to seal the surface), unpainted (paint, for archaeologists, means an even thinner clay or organic solution applied to pottery in a decorative fashion), and shows only stamped decorations on the surface, notably the impression of a cord rolled around a stick. Other very ancient pottery (10,000 to 12,000 years ago is known from China and the Middle East.

In the Americas, the oldest known pottery for several decades was found at the Puerto Hormiga site in Columbia and the Valdivia site in Ecuador, both around 5000 years ago. In the 1990s, ceramics dating to more than 6000 years ago were found and dated by Anna Roosevelt at Santarem in the Amazon basin, and it is probable that still earlier pottery will eventually be found and dated. (All the dates assigned here to both Old World and New World ceramics are based on the radiocarbon or C-14 technique; as pottery was very frequently used for cooking, soot or carbon deposits are often found on both the inside and outside surfaces of the vessels.)

Pottery, Agriculture and Settlement Patterns

Given that much early pottery was used for food preparation and storage, it is not surprising that its appearance is rather closely correlated with the rise of agriculture around the world. It is likely that a combination of hunting, gathering of wild plants and developing agriculture predated ceramics in most places, and archaeologists have long associated agriculture with the tendency for people to remain domiciled longer in the same place.

Yet pottery is, to my mind, an even stronger indicator of this sedentism, because it takes more time to prepare adequate clay, shape vessels and fire them. In general, basic culinary pottery is relatively large, heavy, and breaks easily not something you would want to carry around a lot. This is why basketry predated pottery almost everywhere.

The tendency toward more sedentary agricultural hamlets, villages and towns, and eventually more concentrated nucleated populations in semi-urban and urban cities (also increasingly dependent on agriculture), had a strong and accelerating effect on cultural complexity and social stratification. With this cultural evolution, pottery in myriad forms and with complex decorative techniques and motifs came to be an important medium for ritual and religious symbolism.

Human cultural evolution happened earlier, was more fast-paced, and culminated in larger, more complex manifestations in the belt around the globe s equator formed by the tropics and the semi-tropical latitudes. Thus, in places like Costa Rica, pre-Columbian pottery is hugely abundant and can be found almost everywhere except for high mountain peaks, swamps, and areas whose land surface has been altered by geological events such as landslides, changing river courses, rising sea levels and the like.

This is not so in the middle and northern parts of the modern United States, for example, where archaeologists rejoice at finding just a few scattered potsherds. There, prehistoric and even historic indigenous peoples adapted to their natural surroundings in ways that did not include the manufacture of large amounts of ceramics.

The Oldest Pottery Known in Costa Rica

Although some scientific archaeology has been practiced for more than a century in Costa Rica, it was not until the 1950s that a reliable sequence of ceramic styles, supported by C-14 dates, was established for Guanacaste-Nicoya by Claude Baudez and Michael D. Coe. Shortly thereafter, a similar sequence, with quite different types of pottery from the Central Valley, was set out by Carlos Agular P., Costa Rica s first scientifically trained archaeologist. Neither sequence extended further into the past than about 300 B.C. or 2300 years ago.

Such was the case until 1977, when I discovered and carbon-dated a previously unknown pottery complex in the Turrialba Valley, calling it La Monta�a. It displayed rim and vessel shapes, as well decorative techniques, unlike any other pre-Columbian pottery then known. It was 99% monochrome (one color), but it was very well-made, with definite shapes that were repeated time after time, including perfectly flat-bottomed, raised-edge griddles like those used in early ceramic cultures in northern South America for processing and cooking coarse flour of manioc (cassava) roots, from which tapioca is still made.

Almost all decoration took the form of what archaeologists call plastic techniques, including incising, stamping, combing, modeling and appliqu� motifs done with the clay was still malleable. The pottery from La Monta�a was radiocarbon dated to as early as 1500 B.C., and was found, fortuitously, in ancient, buried organic soil beneath a cemetery dating to around A.D. 500.

Also in 1977, I found another early ceramic complex in the San Carlos plains, called Chaparron after a nearby village. Unlike La Monta�a pottery, Chaparron ceramics were almost all zoned bichrome; that is, a hard glossy red, highly polished slip that was separated by wide incised lines from unslipped zones of the natural buff-colored clay; additional plastic decoration always occurred in these latter zones.

Some vessel shapes were the same as those seen in La Monta�a pottery, but the red-on-buff, precisely zoned appearance of Chaparron ceramics most nearly resembled so-called Formative or Pre-Classical pottery known from southern Mesoamerica, especially Guatemala, C-14 dated to 1500-900 B.C. Chaparron was found in the fill of a late period cemetery, and could not be radiocarbon dated, but virtually identical ceramics found near Lake Arenal at the Tronadora site by Payson Sheets and John Hoopes in the 1980s had several C-14 dates, one as early as 1800 B.C. Very similar pottery was recognized in the Central Valley and the Central Pacific sub-regions, which I named Barba in 1978.

From the mid-1990s until the present, two more early ceramic complexes were identified, excavated and dated. The first was Curr�, found along the Inter-American highway between San Isidro and Golfito in southern Costa Rica by Francisco Corrales Ulloa; the second, Black Creek, was discovered south of the Caribbean port city of Limon by Oscar Fonseca and analyzed by Norberto Baldi. These two pottery styles are similar: monochrome brownish slip and a wide variety of stamped, incised and appliqu�d decorative techniques like those of La Monta�a, the predominant form was a small olla, or globular jar, but all three complexes look South American.

Although the pottery styles from La Monta�a and Chaparron/Tronadora/Barba look quite different when laid out side by side, they share a considerable amount of what archaeologists call modes: mostly rim and vessel shapes, plus many decorative techniques. A unique vessel shape seen in all early ceramic complexes is a large cylindrical form with a solid, flat bottom. Wide, incised lines; shell and cord stamping; and gouged-out designs on black pottery filled with red ochre are some shared decorative techniques of some early Preclassic Olmec pottery vessels found in southern Mexico around 1200 to 900 B.C; it never appears again in later Costa Rican archaeological ceramics.

Costa Rica: A Rich Archaeological Crossroads

The implications of the apparent coexistence of these three different early pottery styles in distinct parts of Costa Rica are that two larger spheres of cultural influence overlapped in this country between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago. To the north, a Mesoamerican cultural tradition with clearly zoned red-on-buff pottery typical of small hamlets practicing maize agriculture; to the south, a long-lasting tropical rain forest tradition of monochrome pottery incorporating flat griddles known to be associated with the cultivation and processing of cassava in northern South America, especially Columbia.

These overlapping cultural spheres echo a similar phenomenon suggested many thousands of years earlier by the presence in Costa Rica of two distinct Paleoindian spear point forms, one typically North American and the other known primarily from South America. It is a phenomenon that produced an amazing diversity of cultural artifacts, including pottery, in a very small portion of the hemisphere Costa Rica is about the size of Indian or West Virginia and that become even more pronounced and obvious to archaeologists over prehistoric time. Its manifestations will be documented in future articles in this series, all the way until the Spanish arrival in the early 1500s.

It is also notable that the oldest known pottery so far in Costa Rica is very sophisticated and well-made; there is no indication of a crude, halting beginning of ceramic technology, with subsequent evolution to more finished styles. This, and the existence of three different, well-developed pottery traditions, tell us that even older pottery remains to be found.