Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

We have here then not so much a renaissance as a naissance, a highly innovative time – relatively short – when three of our most basic ideas were laid down: agriculture, religion, the rectangular house. The mix of abstract and practical down-to-earth ideas would not have been recognised by early humans. Religion would have suffused the other two ideas as each activity spilled over into the other.

When Jericho was excavated by the British archaeologist Dorothy Garrod in the 1930s she made three discoveries of interest in the context of this chapter. First, the settlement consisted of about seventy buildings, housing perhaps as many as a thousand people: Jericho was a ‘town’. Second, she found a tower, eight metres high, nine metres in diameter at the base, with an internal staircase of twenty-two steps. Such architecture was unprecedented – it would have needed a hundred men working for a hundred days to build such an edifice.²⁷ Garrod’s third discovery, unearthed at Terrace B, was a good example of a Natufian baking/cooking unit. ‘This terrace seems to be provided with all the equipment required for the processes: the pavement, partly preserved, would be suitable for hand-threshing and husking; the cup basins and the numerous stone mortars would be suitable for the grinding or milling of the grain; the one larger basin would serve for mixing the ground grits or rough “flour” with water; and all this was found not far from ovens.’²⁸

There was no clay. All tools and personal accessories of the Natufians were produced by the meticulous grinding of stone on stone, or stone on bone.²⁹ The first use of clay in the Middle East is documented at Jericho (ninth millennium BC), at Jarmo (eighth) and at Hacilar (seventh), where it was found mixed with straw and chaff and husks – in effect the by-products of threshing – used to bind bricks. At both Jericho and Jarmo depressions were discovered in the clay floors.³⁰ ‘Whether used as basins for household activities, or as bins, or as ovens with “boiling stones”, the main interest lies in the fact that these immovable receptacles are located together with the ovens and hearths in the courtyards, the working spaces of the houses. We may now conclude . . . that some accidental firing, due to the proximity of the various acts of preparing-cooking-baking the ground wheat or barley in the immovable basins and the oven, was the cause of the transformation of the mud clay into pottery.’³¹ Johan Goudsblom speculates as to whether the preservation of fire became a specialisation in early villages, giving the specialists a particular power.³²

Among archaeologists there has been some debate that the earliest forms of pottery have never been found, because what has been found is too good, too well made to represent ‘fumbling beginnings’.³³ So perhaps pottery was invented there earlier, even much earlier. This would fit with the fact that the very first pottery was made in Japan, as part of the Jomon culture, as early as 14500 BC, among people who were full-time hunter-gatherers.³⁴ The Jomon Japanese were extremely creative, with very sophisticated hand-axes, and they also invented lacquer. However, no one knows exactly why Jomon pottery was invented or what it was used for (it has even been suggested that large numbers were smashed, in some form of ceremony). The full development of pottery, as one of the ‘cultures of fire’, is better illustrated through its development in the Middle East.

At the early Neolithic site of Çatal Hüyük in Turkey (seventh millennium BC), two types of oven were found built next to one another. ‘One is the normal vaulted type of baking oven. The second is different in that it has a fire chamber divided into two compartments by a half brick some 15cm high below the main chamber. The front part of these ovens and kilns, which evidently protruded into the room, was destroyed, and was evidently removed to take out whatever was baked in them, whether pots or bread. With the next firing/baking, the front part would be covered over again, which is of course easily done in mud.’³⁵ It appears from shards found at Jarmo, Jericho and Çatal Hüyük that pots were made from coils of clay laid in rings and then smoothed over. Dung and grasses were the fuel used, rather than wood.³⁶