Andy Langley

Invisible Technology & The Container Revolution

Before pottery was adopted, Mesolithic foragers relied on ‘aceramic’ technology for cooking and food processing including hot stones, organic containers and hearths. However, due to a focus on pottery and lipid analysis and the degradation of organic containers in the record, these technologies have been overlooked. The efficiency of pottery has also previously been assumed but never tested. The question of why certain communities in the Mesolithic adopted pottery has presumed the answer to lie in the superior material properties of ceramics, but the factors that drove and attracted people to adopt it need to be properly explored. 

This project combines experimental archaeology with an examination of biomolecular evidence for the use of stones, containers and hearths in order to evaluate the reasons for technological change with the arrival of pottery, and to explore previously invisible cultural and economic shifts across the Mesolithic. This combination, of outdoor experimental work and indoor laboratory analysis, has the potential to be very powerful and provide a novel methodology for uncovering how 'invisible technologies' may have worked.