Pottery is dishes, plates, cups, and cooking pots made out ofclay. It is a good idea to make dishes and pots out of clay for several reasons. Clay is cheap and easy to get, pretty much anybodycan make a useful pot out of it, and you can make it waterproof pretty easily too. Plus it can be made very beautiful, if you know what you are doing. And it is easy to make yours look different from your neighbor's.
People first started making pottery out of clay around 6000 BC, near the beginning of the Neolithic period. Before that most people had been nomadic, and pottery is too heavy and too breakable for people who are going to move around a lot. Probably they had always known how, but just hadn't done it much, the same as planting seeds. In the beginning, pottery was made by just pushing a hole into a ball of clay, or by making a long snake of clay and coiling it up into a pot shape. Many early pots, meant to be used once and thrown away, are nothing more than a large lump of clay that someone socked their fist into, the way you might sock your fist into a catcher's mitt. These were just lightly fired in a fire of dry weeds. The coiled kind of pot was often fired in a hotter fire, probably by being put in an open campfire or bonfire.
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