Vela Spila Pottery

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CONTENTS

• Paleolithic Ceramic Sculpture
• Why is Vela Spila Cave Important?
• Vela Spila and the Evolution of Pottery in Europe
• Location
• Discovery and Excavation
• Ceramic Art at Vela Spila
• Dating
• References

Paleolithic Ceramic Sculpture

Vela Spila is a key site of ancient pottery off the coast of Croatia, which contains numerous fragments of clay-fired prehistoric sculpture - mainly animal figures - dating to the era of Upper Paleolithic art, around 15,500 BC.

Archaeologists believe that the cave was run by a community of craftsmen, who invented ceramic technology and produced ceramic objects, for about 2,500 years (between 15,500 and 13,000 BC), before vanishing from the archaeological record.

Archaeological evidence indicates that eight millennia passed before ceramic activity was resumed during the Neolithic culture, around 5,000 BC.

Why is Vela Spila Cave Important?

• The cave's clay-fired animal figures are the second oldest ceramic objects ever recorded in Europe (after Dolní Věstonice).
• Vela Spila shows that ceramic technology was first used to make art rather than utilitarian objects, such as cooking pots and other similar vessels. This art-before-utility situation recalls the development of metallurgy, which frequently appeared first in non-utilitarian contexts.
• Vela Spila's ceramic art offers important insights into an emerging representational art tradition in the Balkans, during the early Epigravettian.

Vela Spila and the Evolution of Pottery in Europe

Vela Spila exemplifies the fact that the invention of pottery took place in a number of different places, over an extended period, as these technologies were learned and then sometimes lost.

Here's a brief outline of the haphazard evolution of pottery and Vela Spila's role in it.

Clay-fired pots were first made in China - see, for instance, the Xianren Cave pottery (18,000 BC) and the Yuchanyan Cave pottery (16,300 BC). But Ancient Chinese pottery is not the whole story.

To begin with, the ceramic technology used to make pottery, was invented much earlier.

• The earliest known ceramic objects (or pottery) were fashioned in the Czech Republic at the neighbouring open-air sites of Pavlov I and Dolní Věstonice I, in the Czech Republic, around 29,000 BC - more than ten thousand years before the first pots were made in China. See, for instance, the Venus of Dolní Věstonice.
• About 100 km southwest of Pavlov/Dolní Věstonice, the open-air site of Krems-Wachtberg in Lower Austria was also producing ceramic animal figures, which also date to around 29,000 BC. This probably means the site is part of the Pavlovian tradition.
• Slightly earlier, around 34,000 BC, shallow clay basins were being made at Klisoura cave in Greece. However, it is believed these basins were clay hearths used for cooking, including the roasting of wild grasses. No fragments of actual pottery were discovered. Even so, the basins do suggest the emergence of an independent ceramic technology in Greece, during the early Upper Palaeolithic.
• A third independent tradition involves the site of Kostenki-1 in southern Russia, where fragments of pottery were found, dating to 23,300 BC.
• Vela Spila's ceramics, dating to 15,500 BC continues this tradition of independent innovation. Indeed, the terracotta figurines and fragments at Vela Spila constitute the oldest and largest collection of prehistoric ceramics in Europe, after Dolní Věstonice.

From southern China, pottery know-how spread east to Japan, where it became Jomon Pottery (from 14,540 BC); and north across the border into the Russian Far East, where it became known as Amur River Basin Pottery (from 14,200 BC).

From Asia, pottery spread westwards across the Asian landmass, via early Neolithic Fertile Crescent sites like Nevalı Çori, arriving in Europe around 7,500 BC.

See: Timeline of Ancient Pottery.

Location

Vela Spila is a large, Stone Age cave overlooking the town of Vela Luka, on the island of Korčula, in the central Dalmatian archipelago.

The cave is located about 130 metres above sea level, on the south slope of Pinski Rat hill.

It consists of a single, large chamber, that measures roughly 50 metres in length, 30 metres in width and 17 metres in height. The two openings in the cave roof are the result of rock falls.

When modern humans - that is, Cro-Magnons - first moved into the cave around 18,000 BC, the coastline would have been about 10 km away, due to the lower sea levels caused by the enlarged polar ice sheets.

Discovery and Excavation

The Vela Spila cave has been known to locals for centuries.

The first scientific examination was conducted in 1949 by archaeologist Marinko Gjivoje, who commenced excavations in 1951, aided by Boris Ilakovac, Vinko Foretic and Grga Novak.

In 1974, Novak (1888-1978) began a series of annual excavations of the site and, from 1978, fieldwork continued under the supervision of Božidar Čečuk (1974-95) a member of the Cabinet of Archaeology of the Yugoslav Academy of Science and Arts, Dinko Radić (1996-2006), and Preston Miracle (2007- present).

The prehistoric art recovered from Vela Spila, is now on display at the Centre for Culture in Vela Luka.

The first ceramic figures were found in 2001. More were recovered in 2006.

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Ceramic Art at Vela Spila

Paleolithic Pottery

Excavations at Vela Spila exposed a 4 metre sequence of Pleistocene sediments, with roughly five levels from 17,250 to 12,400 BC.

The oldest pottery - from the era of paleolithic art - was found in the third level from the bottom, and dated to roughly 15,500 BC.

The ceramic material recovered from Vela Spila consists of thousands of ceramic fragments, as well as whole vessels and other objects made of earthenware.

Without destructive analysis of the raw materials used to make the ceramics, scientists cannot be certain that the ceramics were made at Vela Spila, or if they were brought into the cave from elsewhere in the region.

However, the fact that no other paleolithic ceramics have so far been recovered from contemporaneous sites in the region, such as Kopačina (Croatia), Badanj (Bosnia), Crvena Stijena (Montenegro), and Grotta Paglicci (Italy), suggests the ceramics were produced at Vela Spila.

There are two types of ceramic material at Vela Spila:

• Paleolithic ceramic figures of animals.
• Neolithic vessels, some of which are decorated with quite distinctive paintwork. They include a quantity of ceramic pots from the later Chalcolithic period.

The paleolithic objects in the cave consist of 36 reddish-brown fragments of ceramic animal figures, the earliest art of its type in southeastern Europe.

The oldest of these potsherds were recovered from an undisturbed layer of Pleistocene sediments, and dated to 15,500 BC.

This assemblage of animal figures is exemplified by a 4-gram piece of pottery consisting of the torso and foreleg of a deer, which was meticulously crafted with the minimum number of joins, to minimize breakage.

Overall, the size, range and complexity of its terracotta collection indicates that Vela Spila was the heart of an active, if hitherto unknown, ceramic tradition of Stone Age culture, that flourished for about two millennia, before suddenly vanishing around 13,000 BC.

Neolithic Pottery

Ceramic material recovered from the cave includes Neolithic impressed-ware pots incised with shells, fingernails, and other implements, to form abstract signs, such as triangles and crosshatch symbols, as well as paintwork characteristic of the Vela Luka culture.

In addition, there is a large number of engraved and polished black fragments of vessels similar to those found in the Grapceva Spilja cave, on the nearby island of Hvar.

In addition, archaeologists recovered thousands of similar Hvar-style fragments of red pottery decorated with spirals, curvilinear motifs,and serpentiforms. These abstract symbols are similar to those found in cave art across Europe, during the Upper Paleolithic.

Dating

The figurative pottery at Vela Spila is dated to the Epigravettian culture of central and southeastern Europe, which is coterminous with the Solutrean and Magdalenian cultures of Western Europe.

The exact date range of the fragments has been fixed at between 15,500 and 13,000 BC, based on indirect dating methods applied to the sediments in which the pottery was found. These Late Upper Palaeolithic deposits did not contain any intrusive material from later Neolithic deposits.

The Epigravettian layers lie more than 1.5 metres beneath Neolithic deposits. What's more, this area of the cave contains no signs of later pits or postholes dug into underlying sediments. Scientists are therefore confident that the Epigravettian ceramics come from undisturbed layers that remain uncontaminated by younger deposits.

After this, there is no further trace of this type of mobiliary art at Vela Spila.

The Neolithic pottery found in the cave consisted of pots and vessels only. They were found in a layer of sediment that dates to between 5,000 and 4,400 BC.

NEXT: Prehistoric Art Timeline (from 540,000 BC).

References

(1) "First Epigravettian Ceramic Figurines from Europe (Vela Spila, Croatia)." Rebecca Farbstein, Dinko Radić, Dejana Brajković, Preston T. Miracle. Published: July 24, 2012. PLoS ONE 7(7): e41437.
(2) "Pavlov VI: An Upper Palaeolithic living unit". Svoboda, Jiří; Králík, Miroslav; Čulíková, Věra; Hladilová, Šárka; Novák, Martin; Fišáková, Miriam Nývltová; Nývlt, Daniel; Zelinková, Michaela (2009). Antiquity. 83 (320): 282–295.
(3) "The earliest evidence for clay hearths: Aurignacian features in Klisoura Cave 1, southern Greece." P. Karkanas et al. Antiquity, Volume 78, Issue 301, September 2004, pp.513-525.