Long before pottery became a common art form, the southern Levant underwent major environmental changes that stripped vegetation from hillsides and caused large amounts of clay-rich soil to accumulate in the valleys.
Now, a new study led by Amos Frumkin at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggests this process may have exposed Neolithic communities to the effects of intense fire on clay. Frumkin refers to this as the natural kiln hypothesis.
The study, published in Geomorphology, examined evidence from ancient sediments, cave deposits, and charcoal remains and identified two separate periods when wildfire and erosion impacted the area.
The Hills That Burned Twice
The two periods are separated by more than 100,000 years; the first of them was the last interglacial, lasting from about 129,000 to 116,000 years ago. The second was the early Holocene, which lasted from about 11,000 to 7,000 years ago, a period that corresponds with the establishment of farming communities in the region. The most intense burning occurred between 9,500 and 8,200 years ago.
Both periods left similar evidence. Small charcoal particles in ancient lake sediments indicate periods of increased burning. Chemical signatures in cave formations show the loss of vegetation and soil that followed. Frumkin notes that the scale and timing of the fires point toward climatic causes rather than increased human use of fire, although people in the region already used fire on a limited scale.
A Natural Kiln
Once the vegetation disappeared, the hillsides could no longer retain soil when it rained. The terra rossa clay, therefore, washed down the slopes and collected in low-lying areas like the Jordan and Dead Sea valleys, building up in thick layers. Since this redeposited clay was very fertile, Neolithic settlements tended to cluster in these areas.
Pottery appeared in the region during the same time period. Earlier petrographic studies show that local redeposited terra rossa clay provided the material for Yarmukian pottery from the Jordan Valley, the same material that erosion deposited in Frumkin’s study.
“A wildfire is normally seen only as a catastrophe, but environmental disruption can also expose people to new materials and new possibilities,” said Frumkin. “Neolithic communities in the Jordan Valley may have watched fire transform the clay beneath and around their settlements and realized that this process could be reproduced deliberately. If so, one of humanity’s most important technologies may have emerged partly from people learning to imitate what they had already seen nature do.”
The 120,000-Year Comparison
This earlier period can serve as a comparison for this hypothesis. Vegetation also declined, and clay deposited heavily during the last interglacial period; however, pottery did not appear after that event. Frumkin sees this as an example of a natural limitation because the required materials were available 120,000 years earlier, but there were no settled, agricultural societies to identify and replicate the process.
The comparison suggests that environmental conditions alone were not enough to produce pottery. The innovation may have emerged when these conditions intersected with a society capable of recognizing the opportunity and reproducing what it observed.
Frumkin stresses that the hypothesis is still speculative. Although the fires, the clay deposits, and the earliest pottery all come from roughly the same period, current dating techniques cannot establish the exact order of events. Further excavations might search for fire-baked clay beneath the oldest pottery layers and test whether wildfires in the Jordan Valley reached the temperatures needed to harden clay. Finding any pottery that clearly predates the major fire episode would challenge this hypothesis.
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.