ChinaScan.org

For people in the earliest stage of human development, it is earth on which they lived that gave them the earliest artistic inspiration.  That may explains how the earliest pottery was made. The process seems pretty simple: mixing earth with water, shaping the mud by pressing and rubbing with hands and fingers until the roughcast of something useful was produced, placing the roughcast under a tree for air drying and then baking it in fire until it becomes hardened.

Before they began producing clay ware, prehistory people had, for many, many millenniums, limited themselves to changing the shapes of things in nature to make them into production tools or personal ornaments. For example, they crushed rocks into sharp pieces for use as tools or weapons, and produced necklaces by stringing animal teeth or oyster shells with holes they had drilled through. Pottery making, however, was revolutionary in that it was the very first thing done by the human race to transform one thing into another, representing the beginning of human effort to change Nature according to Man’s own design and conception. Prehistory pottery vessels are crude in shape, and the color is inconsistent because their producers were yet to learn how to control the temperature of fire to ensure quality of what they intended to produce. Despite th at, prehistory pottery represents a breakthrough in human development.

Regretfully, scholars differ on exactly how and when pottery – making began. According to a most popular assumption, however, prehistory people may have been inspired after they found, by accident, that mud-coated baskets placed beside a fire often became pervious to water.