9500–8000 BCE: (Women as Inventors and Innovators, the Gendered Aspect of African Ceramic Origins: Women as the Tinkerers, the Technological Experimenters, a…

9500–8000 BCE: (Women as Inventors and Innovators, the Gendered Aspect of African Ceramic Origins: Women as the Tinkerers, the Technological Experimenters, and the Creators of Both Early African Ceramic Traditions, Comparative Cultural Evidence Across the Continent Supporting This Inference, Women as Makers and Ritual Guardians of Ceramic Knowledge, and What This Tells Historians of Early World History About the Roles of Women Everywhere): The origins of ceramic technology in Africa alert us to something else of deep historical significance, something of great general importance for historians of early world history everywhere: its gendered dimension. Women, it appears, were the inventors, the tinkerers, the technological experimenters who created both of the two early African ceramic traditions. The comparative cultural evidence right across the continent strongly supports this inference. Everywhere, except for a very few areas where in recent centuries men were able to take over the roles of commercial pottery producers, women have long been the makers of ceramic wares and, often, the guardians not only of the knowledge and practices but of special rituals meant to ensure the success of their work. Among peoples of the southern savanna belt of Africa, for example, potters were skilled specialists who viewed their work as a calling. Senior potters who had become mothers carried out ritual observances at deposits of potting clay, affirming their primacy and authority over ceramic manufacture. This is not a minor footnote. The first sophisticated pyrotechnology in African history, one of the foundational innovations in all of human technological development, was in all probability invented by women. The history of technology as it is conventionally taught is a history of men and machines. What the African evidence reveals is that the chemical line of invention, the line that leads eventually to modern materials science, began with women experimenting with fire and clay. Five to six thousand years of patriarchal dominance across the middle belt of the world outside Africa have obscured this reality, but the African evidence preserves it.