前言考古学界有许多关于陶器起源的理论,其中之一为烹饪假设,就是说最早的陶器是用做炊具(Schiffer and Skibo 1987:601～602)。世界上许多地区,尤其是美洲和东亚,最早的陶器都具有器壁厚、陶胎松软并以有机物(尤其是植物)为羼合料的特点。在东亚地区,最早的植物质陶(中国考古学中称为夹炭陶)发现于日本(Aikens 1995:22;Kidder 1957:7)、俄国的远东地区(Zhushchikhovskaya 1997)以及中国的长江下游地区(蒋乐平2004)。这些陶器遗存的年代都在距今10000年上下,与之共存的器物包括用于渔猎及采集的石器,有时也有房屋遗迹共存。这一时期显然是人类向定居生活转变的初期阶段,但生计方式仍然以狩猎采 Introduction Archeology has many theories about the origins of pottery. One of them is the culinary hypothesis, that is, the earliest pottery was used as a cookware (Schiffer and Skibo 1987: 601-602). In many parts of the world, especially in the Americas and East Asia, the earliest pottery has the characteristics of wall thickness, loose pottery and organics, especially plants. In East Asia, the earliest phytoplankton (known as clays in Chinese archeology) was found in Japan (Aikens 1995: 22; Kidder 1957: 7), Russia’s Far East (Zhushchikhovskaya 1997) and China’s lower reaches of the Yangtze Jiang Leping 2004). The remains of these pottery survivors are about 10,000 years from now. The coexisting objects include the stone tools used for hunting, hunting and collecting, and sometimes the remnants of houses. This period is clearly the initial stage of the transformation of mankind to settlement, but the livelihoods are still based on hunting