Abstract
POTTERY sherds, when they occur, are some of the most useful 'fossils' the prehistorian can have to deal with. When the are found with an industry, one can be almost certain that they are contemporary. It follows, then, that a known ware imported from some distant region and found associated with an unknown industry will date that industry with reasonable accuracy as being contemporary with the culture which manufactured the particular ware in question. This is not so true in the case of beads. It is a fact, of course, that when the association is real and there has been no subsequent chance introduction, the industry with which the bead of known date is found must be either contemporary with it or later in date. But beads have a long survival value; necklaces made of Egyptian beads were popular in late Victorian times, thousands of years after they were made. Prehistoric housewives, however, smashed crockery as freely as their descendants, and the survival value of a pottery vessel in use is limited. Pottery, then, is particularly useful for correlating in time various cultural levels from different regions. We can therefore be grateful to Marian Welker, who in a paper entitled "The Painted Pottery of the Near East in the Second Millenium B.C. and its Chronological Background", has brought together in convenient form a wealth of detail of the pottery in the Near East at this period (Trans. Amer. Phil. Soc., N.S., 38, part 2 ; September 1948). The paper is arranged by sites and areas, considering especially a number of Syrian localities. The author considers that Mesopotamian influence on the development of the wares in these sites is sporadic and that we shall have to look rather to an Iranian cradle for their origin. Chronological tables and some pages of illustrations are included, and the resulting volume will certainly prove of great use to students. There are also a catalogue of forms and several pages of references.
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Ancient Pottery of the Near East. Nature 163, 477 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/163477a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/163477a0