As a kid I remember thinking that all ancient people ever did was to make pots and smash them, since the vast majority of an archeologist’s work seems to deal with pots. Then, a decade ago, obsessing over the holy grail and Parsifal, I started paying attention to vessels of all kinds and have since found it a diverting field of study. MacGregor goes to Japan to give us the oldest pot in the British Museum, forged pre-agriculture by a Japanese people, the Jomon, who mostly ate fish and nuts. (The archeologists can figure out their diet because the bottom of this pot was never really cleaned, just plated over with gold leaf a few centuries ago and used to brew tea.) MacGregor speculates about how the ancients figured out what happens when you fire clay; must have been one of those weird accidents that changes everything, because nobody would do it on purpose. But once you have a clay pot, your life improves dramatically. Up to this point, you cooked in the fire itself, or toasted on sticks, or on leaves or woven baskets; but from the Jomon to Le Creuset a pot empowers a cook to eat a wider range of things (shellfish, for instance—this pot once cooked oysters) and to make delicious stews and soups. Note the hatching on the side of this unprepossessing item: since it was replacing baskets, and its users were accustomed to woven baskets, they had them lying around, they created a basket-pattern on the wet clay by molding it against extant baskets. New, but not too new. If it looked like a basket, at least people would be able to figure out what to do with it.
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