Activities of the New Stone Age
Three activities stand out. They are the making of pots, the weaving of textiles, and the planting and harvesting of crops accompanied by the domestication of animals.
There can be no question that pottery is an important factor in neolithic life. It was in the New Stone Age that man fully wrought the miracle of “a sort of magic transubstantiation—the conversion of mud or dust into stone,” as Childe puts it. It was, as he says, “the earliest conscious utilization by man of a chemical change.”[18] But behind this miracle and this science must have lain many years of almost accidental, adventitious experiment. L. S. B. Leakey claims specimens of partially baked pottery sherds in paleolithic Africa.[19] One of these shows marks of basketry, rather thin support for the theory that the women who daubed the inside of the baskets to make them hold water must have discovered, when the baskets stood too near the fire, a little bit about how to bake clay. It was not until the invention of agriculture tied neolithic man more or less to the soil that true pottery could and did flourish widely. We have added many refinements to the craft of the potter—porcelain, cloisonné, and so forth—but basically it remains unchanged. Incidentally, all agriculturists did not have pottery—the Big Bend and Hueco cave dwellers of Texas, and certain people of the Virú valley in Peru, for example.[20]
The craft of textile weaving almost reached perfection at the hands of neolithic man—or, rather, woman. But it stemmed from basketry, and basketry undoubtedly began in the Paleolithic Age.
The first of two interesting facts suggested by the foregoing is that woman was the only true begetter of the Neolithic Age. She did the weaving—first of baskets and then of textiles—and she invented and practiced pottery making. More than that, she must be credited with the planting and harvesting of grain; for, while her lord and master enjoyed himself on the hunt, she gathered fruits, nuts, and edible seeds, and sooner or later this led her to observe that seeds she carelessly dropped on the midden pile produced new and bigger plants. By so doing woman invented work; for early man was only an idler who gave himself intermittently to the pleasures of the chase. Woman also invented leisure—true, creative leisure—for out of agriculture rose a settled community and a surplus of provender which allowed the few to think and plan and build civilization.