Jomon Pot

A History of the World in 100 Objects

BBC

History

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2010

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A History of the World told through 100 objects from the British Museum moves to Japan and the story of a 7,000-year-old clay pot which has managed to remain almost perfectly intact. Pots began in Japan around 17000 years ago and, by the time this pot was made, had achieved a remarkable sophistication. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, explores the history of this cooking pot and the Jomon; the hunter-gatherer society that made it. The archaeologists Professor Takashi Doi and Simon Kaner describe the significance of agriculture to the Jomon and the way in which they made their pots and used decorations from the natural world around them. This particular pot is remarkable in that it was lined with gold leaf in perhaps the 18th century and used in that quintessentially Japanese ritual, the tea ceremony. This simple clay object makes a fascinating connection between the Japan of today and the emerging world of people in Japan at the end of the Ice Age

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of A History of the World in a Hundred Objects from BBC Radio 4.
0:08.0	Thousands of years ago, one of our ancestors must accidentally have made their first pot.
0:14.8	We can imagine that a lump of wet clay somehow ended up in the fire, dried out, hardened and
0:20.7	formed a hollow shape, a shape that could hold things in a tough material.
0:26.0	Until now, for the Ice Age cook, leaves were soggy, baskets and skins leaked and burned and meat charred.
0:33.8	Suddenly when that wet clay hardened a whole world of
0:38.4	culinary possibilities and ceramic design opened up. The miraculous accident that produced pottery coincided with some great developments in human history.
0:59.0	In the previous four programs I've been looking at the way humans began to rear animals
1:07.8	and to cultivate plants.
1:10.6	As a consequence they started to cook differently, to eat new things and therefore to live differently.
1:16.0	They settled down.
1:18.0	Today, we're in Japan, about 7,000 years years ago with an ancient pot made in a tradition that goes back almost 10,000 years before that.
1:31.0	The earliest dates we've got for pottery around about 16,500 years ago.
1:37.0	And that in itself has caused quite a fuss because this is still what most people recognize as the old stone age with people hunting big game animals.
1:46.0	We don't really expect to find pottery quite as early as that.
1:49.0	It was in Japan that the world's first pottery was born and with it possibly the world's first pottery was born and with it possibly the world's first stew
2:00.4	A history of the world in a hundred objects. Jomun pot, a clay pot from Japan.
2:17.0	A clay pot from Japan, approximately 5,000 BC.
2:27.0	You find pots in museums all around the world and here in the Enlightenment
2:38.8	Gallery of the Bush Museum we have pots from all over the world Greek vases with heroes fighting on them
2:45.3	Ming bowls from China pot-bellied African jars and beautiful wedge wood terrains
2:51.2	The world's pots are so ubiquitous that we take all of them for
	...

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