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| © Trustees of the British Museum |
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The Jomon pots, invented by the people living in Japan, China and Korea, are the oldest form of pottery in the world, dating back to the last Ice Age, approximately 14,000 years ago. The pots allowed people to cook foods. This particular Jomon pot was found thousands of years after it was made.
The gold foil in the inside was added in the 1800s to be used during Japanese tea ceremonies.
The pot was found in Japan and is from about 5,000 BCE.
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| © Trustees of the British Museum |
Pottery was originally believed to be developed by farmers and not hunter-gather nomads. These pots, however, proved that pottery could be used for hunter-gathers. The people of Japan had a different environment than their European, African and Central-Asian counterparts. The Japanese area provided several different foods that allowed them to settle in one place for several years, making pottery a needed development.
Rebecca Stacey, Scientist, British Museum, wrote:
Pots with preserved original contents are very rare.
We cannot fully reconstruct ancient recipes by analysing food residue but we can recognise types of food that were cooked. This helps us to understand the range of foodstuffs that were available in the ancient diet and how the cooking of these foods may have improved their nutritional value or preserved them. So, we can start to understand more about how food resources were managed in the past.
Burnt food deposits are sometimes found on the surfaces of cooking pots and these can be analysed to detect the foods that were cooked.
Even seemingly ‘clean’ vessels often contain the remains of foods which have been soaked-up by the fabric of a vessel. These ‘invisible’ residues are usually better preserved than surface deposits because the ceramic fabric protects them from decay.
Residues are analysed by using a technique known as gas chromatography – mass spectrometry (GC/MS). This separates the molecules of the residue and provides information from which these molecules can be identified. It is a powerful method for understanding what is present in ancient food residues.
Some food stuffs preserve better than others. Fats are insoluble in water and fairly resistant to decay, whereas sugars and proteins are much more likely to be lost over time. For this reason fatty foods – such as meat, fish, dairy products and vegetable oils – are the most commonly detected.
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-VB
