Cord-marked pottery or Cordmarked pottery is an early form of a simple earthenware pottery made in precontact villages. It allowed food to be stored and cooked over fire. Cord-marked pottery varied slightly around the world, depending upon the clay and raw materials that were available. It generally coincided with cultures moving to an agrarian and more settled lifestyle, like that of the

Woodland period In the classification of :category:Archaeological cultures of North America, archaeological cultures of North America, the Woodland period of North American pre-Columbian cultures spanned a period from roughly 1000 Common Era, BCE to European con ...

, as compared to a strictly

hunter-gatherer A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, ...

lifestyle.

Making cord-marked pottery

Pottery was made by gathering clay from hillsides or streams. Other material—shells, stone, sand, plant fibers, crushed fired clay—added to the clay tempers it to prevent cracking and shrinking when dried and fired. Several methods were used to create the rough shape of the vessel: pinching and shaping, paddling, or coiling, the latter of which means to build up a pot with coils of rolled clay. Layers of coiled clay are then pinched, thinned, and smoothed. Another method, paddling, is accomplished by pounding a lump of clay with a wooden paddle against a large stone. The fabric texture may appear on the side of the pottery if the paddle was covered with fabric. Otherwise, the pot could be created by shaping and pinching a lump of clay. Cord-marked pottery was then made with a paddle and anvil method that was accomplished by pressing cord-wrapped paddles against the side of the pottery to form and thin the pottery. This was done while holding an anvil stone on the inside of the vessel. The fiber cords prevented the paddles from sticking to the wet clay. This created small, parallel ridges in the pottery. Pottery was then dried for two weeks and fired. The rough surface that was created made it easy to hold on to the vessels, particularly when wet or greasy. The rough surface also allowed "more effective transfer of heat (energy) from a cooking fire to the contents of the pot compared to a vessel with a smooth exterior." Mostly three types of impressions are obtained by using (1) single strand cord, (2) double strands twisted cord and (3) knots of thick cord in Maipur. The cords are wrapped around a paddle in case of the first two types, while the paddle is covered with a net made by tying knots in series of thick cord in the case of the third type.

Asia

In Japan, the