Dotted wavy line and wavy line pottery facts for kids

Wavy Line Pottery is a special type of ancient pottery found in North and East Africa. These pots and bowls are some of the oldest ever made, created by people who hunted, fished, and gathered food between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago. You can easily spot them because they have cool patterns of solid wavy lines or dotted wavy lines.

What is Wavy Line Pottery?

During a time called the later Holocene period, people living in Northern Africa made unique pottery. They decorated it with wavy lines that were either carved in or made from tiny dots. These pottery pieces are very old, dating back 5,000 to 10,000 years. This makes them some of the earliest pottery found in Africa.

These ancient people lived during a time known as the African humid period. Back then, places that are now dry deserts had many lakes and rivers. People settled near these waters, living in camps that were sometimes permanent. Archaeologists find this wavy line pottery along with special bone tools, like barbed points, which show that these people were skilled at fishing and living by the water.

Where Was This Pottery Found?

Many pieces of wavy line pottery were discovered in Sudan, a country in Africa. Important sites like Khartoum Hospital and Shaheinab in the Nile Valley are where a lot of these finds happened. Khartoum was settled a long time ago, during the Mesolithic era. Shaheinab is just north of Khartoum, right by the Nile River.

A famous archaeologist named A. J. Arkell dug at these sites in the late 1940s and early 1950s. While most wavy line pottery comes from these two places, other pieces have been found across North and East Africa. The very oldest pottery evidence comes from Niger, where scientists used special dating methods. This shows that people in Africa started making pottery on their own around 8,600 BC!

How Was the Pottery Decorated?

Decorating Patterns

When archaeologist Arkell talked about "wavy line" pottery, he meant different kinds of wavy patterns. Some pots have "incised" wavy lines, which are smooth, continuous waves carved into the clay. Others have "dotted" wavy lines, where the waves are made up of many small dots.

Both types of pottery can have arch-shaped patterns or different kinds of waves, like short waves or long waves.

Tools Used for Decorating

The ancient potters used many different tools to create these decorations. They used combs, tools with prongs (like a fork), and flat tools called spatulas. These tools were made from things found in nature, like animal bones, mollusk shells, wood, plants, or even clay. Basically, any tool with a jagged or serrated edge could be used to make the cool wavy patterns.

Pottery Differences by Region

There are small differences in the wavy line pottery depending on where it was found. The patterns, the tools used, and even the type of clay or added materials (called "tempers") can vary. Scientists haven't fully studied why these differences exist, but it might be because different materials were available in different areas.

Northeast Africa Pottery

Certain decorating patterns seem to belong to specific regions. For example, pottery with smaller waves was more common in the central Sahara Desert and northern Chad. Pottery with longer waves was mostly found in the Eastern Sahara and the Nile Valley.

Dotted wavy line pottery has been found all over the northern part of Africa. However, dotted wavy line pottery with small waves was mostly in the central Sahara, and not often found near Khartoum. Also, the incised wavy line pottery (a type of dotted wavy line) was mostly found between Chad and the Red Sea, especially between Khartoum and Atbara.

Lake Turkana Pottery

Similar pottery, also with carved and dotted wavy lines, was found in the Lake Turkana Basin in Kenya. This pottery is very much like the pottery from Northeast Africa, especially the pieces from Khartoum. But there are still some regional differences in the patterns, tools, and tempers used.

Scientists think this pottery style might have spread from Northeast Africa. However, more research is needed to compare the lives and pottery of the people from East and Northeast Africa.

Pottery from Different Time Periods

Arkell noticed that the simple wavy line pottery was common in the early Mesolithic period. The dotted wavy line pottery, however, was more common in the late Mesolithic period.

These two types of pottery also differed in other ways. The potters from these different times used distinct tools to make their decorations. They also used different materials to temper the clay. Tempering means adding materials to the clay to make it stronger and easier to work with. Earlier pottery was often tempered with quartz or sand. Later potters used organic materials like plant fibers, shells, or bone.

See also

• Ancient Egyptian pottery
• Esh Shaheinab