Boiling Energy: Socioecological and Spiritual Dimensions of Pottery Emergence in Later Stone Age Southern Africa

Africa possesses one of the world’s longest legacies of pottery production. From several early Holocene centers of innovation across the Sahara and Sahel, ceramic technology spread south, arriving at the opposite end of the continent some nine millennia later. This paper examines the final chapter of the technology’s long journey through the African continent. The origins of ceramics in Southern Africa are bound up with long-standing questions of migration, identity, and interaction. Complicating matters further is the strong likelihood that certain ceramic traditions were independently invented within the subcontinent itself. After reviewing the introduction of Neolithic lifeways to Southern Africa and the subcontinent’s earliest ceramic industries, we spotlight the current state of knowledge about Cape coastal wares. We then discuss the circumstances surrounding, and possible reasons for, pottery’s uptake among Later Stone Age foragers in southwestern Africa, with climatic, dietary, social and spiritual factors given consideration. We argue that regional hydroclimates, social dynamics, and worldviews likely all played salient roles.