Ceramics in Africa Olivier P. Gosselain* Université libre de Bruxelles Pottery making is a very ancient craft in Africa, as some of the oldest pottery remains known in the world were discovered on this continent. Dating from around 10,000 BCE – i.e., one or two millennia after the inception of the Jomon pottery in Japan – they were excavated in the Aïr Region of Niger (West Africa) (Haour, 2003). Throughout history, the craft has endured important changes in relation to the shape, function, and decoration of the products, as well as manufacturing techniques, scale of production, or the social status of the potters. The last decades have proved particularly significant in that regard, due to the massive introduction of plastic and metal containers, social and economic transformations, the development of tourism and urban lifestyle, and the spatial extension of social networks. In most places, ancient pottery functions such as cooking, handling, and serving have been abandoned, while new categories of products such as decorative or commemorative items, flowerpots, tiles, braziers, or incense burners have boomed. Water jars, however, continue to be massively produced in some parts of the continent, as they provide the cheaper and most efficient way of keeping cool water in rural areas. Social Background A comparison of several hundred ethnographic sources (Information examined in this article comes from two bodies of data. Since 1990, members of the Ceramic & Society Project developed at the University of Brussels and its research associates have conducted fieldwork in Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and D.R. Congo, collecting information about some 1,000 potters in nearly 100 linguistic groups. The second body of data comes from a systematic perusal of the ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological literature devoted to pottery making in sub-Saharan Africa. These sources are of varying relevance and accuracy as they range from large-scale and detailed studies to more local/regional observations, or mentions in ethnographic monographs, administrative reports, and religious publications. Altogether, more than 900 sources have been processed, which relate to some 650 linguistic groups.) indicates that at last four–fifths of the African potters working today are women, which confirms the usual description of pottery making in Africa as a “female activity.” But male potters are also encountered in several regions of the continent, where they either specialize in the making of particular vessels (big water jars, elite ware, bottles) while women produce the largest part of the repertoire, or produce the whole range of vessels in contexts where women are excluded from the craft, or work together with female relatives, carrying out specific operations such as clay extraction and transport, clay preparation, firing, and, above all, plastic decoration (Schildkrout & Keim, 1990). The scale of production is highly variable, ranging from part-time, isolated artisans, whose products are essentially consumed locally, to full-time specialists working in workshops, whose vessels are distributed by middlemen in a 100–200 km radius. If men tend to be more frequently *Email: olivier.gosselain@ulb.ac.be Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_8911-2 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Page 1 of 18