Ancient Cookware from the Levant - An Ethnoarchaeological Perspective - Gloria London
14. Neolithic and Chalcolithic Cookware
Ancient Cookware from the Levant - An Ethnoarchaeological Perspective - Gloria London
Gloria London [+]
Independent Scholar
Description
Round and even flat-bottomed jars with holemouth rims and soot on their bases were used for cooking. They likely were not the earliest cookware in the Levant. The first Neolithic examples have probably not survived. If early cooking pots were fabricated from clay bodies without calcite and low fired, they were unable to resist repeated thermal stress and their likelihood to survive was in jeopardy. In contrast, baking trays were thick enough to survive although they are highly fragmented and in poor condition. Spouted vessels were used to milk goats and to distill or process foodstuffs. Chalcolithic-era churns are clearly associated with processing dairy foods.