Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

At a village like Teleilat al Ghassul, near the northern edge of the Dead Sea, in Jordan, we see both stone tools and early pottery, as this important transition occurs. Frederic Matson found during his excavations at Tepe Sarab, near Kermanshah in western Iran (a site roughly contemporaneous with Jarmo), that there were but three principal diameters of the vessels. Does this suggest three functions? He found that, once invented, the technology of pottery quickly improved. For example, methods were found to lower the porosity of the clay, using burnishing or more intensive firing and, sometimes, the impregnation of organic materials. Vessels that were too porous lost water too quickly; but vessels needed to be a little porous so that some water evaporated, helping to cool what remained.³⁷

Some early pots were left plain, but decoration soon appeared. Red slip was the first type of decoration used, together with incising, using the fingers. ‘The discovery that the brown earth will fire to a bright red colour might have come from camp fires.’³⁸ The most common pot shapes at the earliest sites are globular (for rodent-free storage), part of which was underground, and open bowls, probably used for gruel or mush made from the seeds of wild and cultivated plants.³⁹ After the first pots – blackened, brown or reddened as the case might be – creams and mottled grey began to appear (in Anatolia, for instance).⁴⁰ Cream-ware especially lent itself to decoration. The earliest decorations were made by hand, then by pressing such things as shells into the clay before firing.⁴¹ Lids, spouts and flaring rims also evolve, and from here on the shape and decorations of pottery become one of the defining characteristics of a civilisation, early forms of knowledge for archaeologists for what they reveal about ancient societies.

The Woman and the Bull, identified by Cauvin as the first true gods, as abstract entities rather than animal spirits, found echoes elsewhere, at least in Europe in the Neolithic period. They occurred in very different contexts and cultures, together with a symbolism that itself differed from place to place. But this evidence confirms that sedentism and the discovery of agriculture did alter early humans’ way of thinking about religion.

Between – roughly speaking – 5000 BC and 3500 BC, we find the development of megaliths. Megaliths – the word means ‘large stones’ – have been found all over the world but they are most concentrated, and most studied, in Europe, where they appear to be associated with the extreme western end of the continent – Spain, Portugal, France, Ireland, Britain and Denmark, though the Mediterranean island of Malta also has some of the best megalithic monuments. Invariably associated with (sometimes vast) underground burial chambers, some of these stones are sixty feet high and weigh as much as 280 tons. They comprise three categories of structure. The original terms for these were, first, the menhir (from the Breton men = stone and hir = long), usually a large stone set vertically into the ground. The cromlech (crom = circle, curve and lech = place) describes a group of menhirs set in a circle or half-circle (for example, Stonehenge, near Salisbury in England). And third, the dolmen (dol = table and men = stone), where there is usually an immense capstone supported by several upright stones arranged to form an enclosure or chamber.⁴² The practice now is to use plain terms such as ‘circular alignment’ for cromlech.