---
title: "Çemka Höyük clay pots in Türkiye were fired 11,300 years ago; early potters mixed in dung and plants"
url: https://badiyaa.com/cemka-hoyuk-early-fired-clay-pottery/
published: 2026-11-13T13:36:00+00:00
modified: 2026-11-13T13:36:00+00:00
section: Science
publisher: Badiyaa
---

# Çemka Höyük clay pots in Türkiye were fired 11,300 years ago; early potters mixed in dung and plants

Clay fragments from Çemka Höyük in Türkiye were deliberately fired about 11,300 years ago, making them some of South-west Asia's earliest pottery.

Some 11,300 years ago, villagers on a mound in what is now southeastern Türkiye mixed crushed plants and animal dung into clay, built pots from flat slabs and baked them in fires of roughly 600 to 700°C (1,100 to 1,300°F). The 46 fragments they left behind at Çemka Höyük, from nine vessels, rank among the earliest deliberately fired clay containers known from South-west Asia, according to [a study in the journal Antiquity](https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2026.10371).

That is about 2,000 years before pottery caught on across the region in the seventh millennium BC. The authors, from Koç University and Mardin Artuklu University in Türkiye and the Russian Academy of Sciences, read the finds as a community testing what clay could do long before anyone depended on it.

## How they proved it was fired on purpose

Clay that sits near a hearth can bake by accident, so the team compared the fragments against unfired clay from the same houses. X-ray diffraction showed that the fired pieces had lost much of their calcite and illite signal and begun to form hematite, signs of heating above 600°C. The unfired clay showed none of that.

Crucially, the change was steady across the samples, which the authors take as evidence of a repeated, controlled firing in a bonfire rather than a one-off accident. Many sherds have a black core and reddish or buff surfaces, the signature of a short, hot burn followed by cooling with little oxygen.

The recipe was deliberate too. Some vessels hold up to 30% crushed plant matter, and microscope work found dung spherulites, tiny crystals that form in animal guts, in two of them. Burning that filler away leaves channels in the clay that may have helped it survive heat.

## What people made

The finds fall into three groups. Two sets of thin shards seem to have coated oval objects about 70 mm (under 3 inches) across, burnt outside and raw inside, possibly linked to cooking. One thick piece looks like a clay collar added to a stone bowl to raise its capacity, with two holes perhaps for tying on a lid. The rest come from slab-built vessels, one with a rim 270 mm (about 10.6 inches) wide.

The idea that clay plaster on walls led to clay pots is the paper’s central argument: the people of Çemka already smeared clay on stone walls, and the authors suggest that habit fed into vessel-making.

## Where it sits in pottery’s timeline

Çemka does not hold the world record. The study notes that the oldest known pottery comes from East Asia and dates to the sixteenth millennium BC, roughly 17,000 to 18,000 years ago, with Africa showing early wares around the same time as Çemka. A rough sum from the paper’s dates: c. 9350 BC plus 2,026 years gives an age of about 11,376 years. For another case of ancient technology arriving earlier than expected, read about [the meteorite iron hidden in Spain’s Treasure of Villena](https://badiyaa.com/treasure-villena-meteoritic-iron-bronze-age/), or see more finds on our [science page](https://badiyaa.com/category/science/).

## The limits

The sample is small, and road building for the Ilısu Dam project had already bulldozed through the mound before rescue digs began. The two radiocarbon dates come from wood charcoal of unknown species, not short-lived material, which can make dates look slightly older. And the authors stress that these early pots did not spread: the community was “not yet reliant on ceramics for storage or cooking.” They call for microstructural and experimental work to test how the early potters made their choices.

## Further reading

- [Antiquity: Understanding a first attempt at pottery (open access)](https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2026.10371)

- [Wikipedia: Pre-Pottery Neolithic A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Pottery_Neolithic_A)

*Image: Gary Todd, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons*

*This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*