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Creativity
New Things: Explaining Innovation
Necessity, the proverb says, is the mother of invention. But is it always true?
Posted July 31, 2012
Kneading Clay
I've been thinking a lot recently about how people start making and using new things. You would think archaeology had well developed approaches to this, but really, we don't. Most often, in the spirit of "necessity is the mother of invention", we assume that novel things were invented because of a pressing need.
There is a name for that kind of thinking: teleology. In essence, it absolves us of tackling very thorny issues by the assumption that there must have been a reason, or the new thing would not have come into being.
The reason I am thinking about novelty, and how to explain it, is partly my own research on the early creation of pottery in Central America (around 2000-1500 BC). But my concern was sharpened by the publication in Science in June of a paper titled "Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong Cave, China".
That article says that pottery is now 2,000 to 3,000 older than previously established. (The authors aren't counting the figurines made and fired at the central European site Dolní Vestonice, 10,000 years earlier than the dates of the Xianrendong cave, because there, fired clay wasn't used for vessels.)
The authors of the new study of early Chinese pottery conclude that
pottery was produced by mobile foragers who hunted and gathered during the Late Glacial Maximum. These vessels may have served as cooking devices. The early date shows that pottery was first made and used 10 millennia or more before the emergence of agriculture.
The invocation of "the emergence of agriculture" when talking about pottery production is part of a long-established archaeological way of thinking about a whole cluster of innovations that characterized what in Europe is called the Neolithic—the "New Stone" age.
The Chinese data break this cluster of innovations apart. Instead of seeing sedentary life, agriculture, and the development of a new technology needed to store the products of agriculture and convert them into more digestible form through cooking, at least in this time and place, pottery vessels came first, and long before farming.
On the Science Friday website, University of Illinois anthropologist Stanley Ambrose explained the early pottery in East Asia as part of a shift from reliance on meat to dependence on plants:
It’s an area where archaeologists speculate that large mammals, such as the woolly mammoth, first started going extinct. During the last ice age, humans depended primarily on these large animals for food, but these mammals’ declining populations could have forced humans to find other reliable ways to feed themselves.
“If you have plenty of big animals around, why bother spending all this time collecting small seeded grains?” said Dr. Ambrose. “These must have been places where those large mammals began to go extinct.”
Necessity, in the form of fewer large mammals, now leads first to pottery for storage and cooking (indicated, the article says, by burn marks on some pottery). The new dietary orientation toward plants in turn leads people to early experiments in cultivating plants, ultimately resulting in full-scale agriculture.
It is a very sturdy story to have held up to the demonstration that pottery, and fired clay technology more generally, long preceded plant cultivation.
But for me, it doesn't quite explain the innovation. Yes, people may have had new subsistence challenges. Yet how does that inspire them to take clay, crushed rock, and water, mix them, shape vessels, and fire them to set their shape?
In a commentary in the issue of Science that saw publication of the Xianrendong study, archaeologist Gordon Shelach calls for an exploration of "the socioeconomic reasons for the development of pottery and the ways in which this new technology evolved and affected human adaptation and social norms". Like me, he is drawn to question the role of necessity in inventions like this. Her suggests that early pottery "initially had a much more limited set of functions" than it later came to have.
What we need to do in thinking about the development of new technologies was illustrated by archaeologist K. D. Vitelli in an article called "'Looking Up' at Early Ceramics in Greece". Instead of assuming that pottery was invented for the purposes of storage, cooking, and serving that eventually pottery assumed, she argued that we needed to think about what could have motivated early experiments with shaping and firing vessels. What would people have known about clay and firing? What might they have been motivated to do by applying this material to new purposes?
Her answer in the case of ancient Greece rested on observing that early pots were small, made of very diverse mixtures of clay and other materials. This suggested to her that makers were keeping their procedures and recipes private. The small vessels were not useful for storage or cooking; but, she suggested, they might have been containers for mixtures of medicinal purpose. The very process of shaping clay and firing it could itself have been seen as evidence of magical knowledge.
This way of thinking about early use of clay is grounded in the specifics of the way people were already living their lives, instead of taking for granted a universal motivation for making pottery vessels. It asks what people would have known about the material before they applied it to make new things. It directs our attention to other uses of clay—including the use of fired and unfired clay to shape images. It challenges our notion that there is an automatic distinction we can impose between fired clay containers and other uses of fired clay.
In Central America, archaeologists John Clark and David Cheetham, trying to understand the earliest fired clay vessels on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, adopted a similar strategy. The new things there were small serving vessels with varied and elegant decoration. There were initially no storage vessels, and no signs of cooking. Clay, they suggest, was used to produce permanent versions of containers previously made from perishable materials like gourds, allowing a greater range of plastic and painted decoration than could be achieved in these other materials. Implicit in their argument is the idea that people already had some knowledge of the plasticity of clay, and its potential as a decorative medium.
Taking this kind of approach to the Xianrendong Cave pottery, we might ask, how were they already using clay? were there clay hearths, as there were in early Greece, that would have introduced the people of Xianrendong to the potential of firing in fixing the shape of otherwise-malleable clay?
In thinking about the creation of new things like early pottery, I try to think about technology transfer. The Xianrendong pottery was made using techniques described as "sheet laminating and coiling with paddling". Coiling obviously mimics the shaping of baskets from flexible fibers. What these authors call "sheet laminating" involves building up individual pieces of clay by overlapping them and connecting them with pressure. What other materials were around, already being worked in this fashion? Was unfired clay worked in this way, perhaps to create fire installations, or to line pits for storage?
Paradoxically, taking this kind of approach tends to blur the line of "invention". Instead of taking for granted that new things were made in response to new needs, we take the position that human beings were experimenting with materials and techniques in their environment, and were ready to transfer technologies to new uses after circumstances changed. In the Greek example, soon after the early, varied, small, vessels appeared, larger storage and cooking vessels became common. In coastal Mexico, not long after the flourishing of serving vessels exploiting the plasticity of clay for decoration, storage jars were created, and eventually, cooking vessels were made of the now very familiar material.
New things—but not inventions; the unfolding of the possibilities of technologies. Nothing to take for granted, and plenty of new questions to ask each time we find pottery or fired clay where it wasn't supposed to be, when it shouldn't yet exist, without the other practices that once made it easy for archaeologists to say that pottery was created as part of the Neolithic Revolution.
And those ideas are also new things.
