User:Ers77/Dotted wavy line and wavy line pottery

In the later part of the Holocene, fishers and hunter-gatherers in Northern Africa created pottery that was characterized by the decorative cohesive and dotted wavy lines. These pieces were created between ten thousand and five thousand years ago, during the African Humid Period. These fisher-hunter-gatherers lived in semi-permanent and permanent settlements along the numerous bodies of water that existed in the now-arid regions of North and East Africa. These settlements are characterized by the discovery of Wavy Line Pottery found in conjunction with barbed bone points, which are adaptations for an aqualithic lifestyle. The Wavy Line Pottery is some of the oldest pieces of pottery found in Africa, some of it dating back to the tenth millenium before present.

Many pieces of the Wavy Line and Dotted Wavy Line pottery were discovered in the Khartoum Hospital and Shaheinab sites in the Nile Valley of Sudan. Khartoum was settled during the Mesolithic era, and the Khartoum Hospital was the first hospital of the settlement. The Shaheinab site is just North of the Khartoum site on the West bank of the Nile River. Extensive excavations were done at these sites by archaeologist A. J. Arkell in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Although the majority of the Wavy Line and Dotted Wavy Line pottery was found in these two sites, additional pieces were discovered across the North and East of the African continent. Additionally, each decorating motif appears to pertain to a specific region. Wavy Line Pottery was discovered across North and Eastern Africa, although the pottery with smaller waves was more common in central Sahara and Northern Chad, while sites with longer waves were mostly in the Eastern Sahara and Nile Valley. Dotted Wavy Line Pottery was discovered in the Northernmost part of the continent across the Sahara, however within the category of Dotted Wavy Line, the Dotted Wavy Line Pottery with small waves was concentrated in the central portion of the Sahara, and were rarely found in the Khartoum area. Additionally, Incised Wavy Line Pottery, a subcategory of the Dotted Wavy Line Pottery, was mostly discovered in an area between Chad and the Red Sea, but most of the sites containing this decorating motif were concentrated between Khartoum and Atbara.

Similar pottery, also characterized by Incised and Dotted Wavy Line pottery was discovered in the Lake Turkana Basin of Kenya. This pottery is much alike that of Northeast Africa, especially the Khartoum pottery, although there are some regional differences.

Arkell defined that the Wavy Line Pottery was characteristic of the Early Mesolithic, while the Dotted Wavy Line pottery was characteristic of the Late Mesolithic, therefore these two series of pottery differ slightly in aspects besides decorating motifs. The potters of these different periods of time used distinct implements, or tools, to create the decoration, as well as separate materials to temper the clay. In general, the earlier pottery was tempered with quartz or sand, while potters later on used organic tempers, such as chaff, shell, or bone.