The New Stone Age: pottery and villages

The oldest pottery in Korea comes from Gosan-ri on the coast of Jeju, a site first reported by a villager in 1987.

About ten thousand years ago the last ice age ended and the Korean peninsula took on roughly the shape it has today. People changed how they lived, too. Korean textbooks date the start of the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, to about 8000 BCE. Gosan-ri on Jeju Island is among the earliest Neolithic sites; the National Institute of Korean History dates it to about ten thousand years ago. That is roughly the same period as 8000 BCE, not evidence by itself of an earlier date. Textbook dates are round numbers, and new digs keep pushing the beginning back.

Clay pots for storing and cooking

The clearest sign of the new age is pottery. Once people could shape clay and fire it, they could store grain, carry water and boil food. At Gosan-ri a villager reported chipped stone tools in 1987, pieces of raised-pattern pottery were collected from 1988, and the site became historic site number 412 in 1998. Later the most common pots were comb-pattern pottery, bitsal-munui togi, decorated with rows of short slanting lines pressed or scratched into the clay. Many have pointed or round bottoms, so they were probably set into sand or soft ground.

Settling down by rivers and the sea

Neolithic sites are spread across the whole peninsula, mostly along big rivers and the coast. People fished with bone hooks and nets, dug shellfish, and hunted with stone spears and arrows. They also began to farm. With stone hoes they broke the soil and grew millets called jo and pi, harvested them with stone or bone sickles, and ground the grain on grinding stones. Spindle whorls show that they spun thread, and bone needles show that they sewed clothes.

Farming meant staying in one place. People dug a round or square pit, set posts around it and covered it with a roof: a pit house, or umjip. The Amsa-dong site in Seoul, beside the Han River, has a whole village of them, and its comb-pattern pottery is the example pictured in many textbooks. Families of the same clan formed villages, and several clans together made a tribe. An experienced tribal elder led farming and hunting. Unlike Paleolithic people, they stayed in one place.

Meanwhile, elsewhere

The Korean Neolithic was long, and while villagers at Amsa-dong were pressing patterns into their pots, other parts of the world were changing fast. Around 3300 BCE the first writing appeared on clay tablets in the city of Uruk in Mesopotamia, and around 2550 BCE the Great Pyramid was built in Egypt for King Khufu. Korea had no writing for thousands of years after that, which is why its prehistory lasts so much longer than Egypt's. Open the World row of the timeline to see these events beside the Neolithic band.