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A typology was established for more than 5000 ceramic artifacts at Dolni Vestonice, Czechoslovakia. Conjectured methods of manufacture were confirmed by radiography. The compositions and mineralogy of the artifacts were identical to those of the local soil, loess. A firing temperature range of 500 degrees to 800 degrees C was measured and compared with those of hearths and kilns. The mechanism of sintering was impurity-initiated, liquid-phase sintering. Many fracture sections show evidence of thermal shock, although thermal expansion of the loess is low. The making, firing, and sometimes exploding of the figurines may have been the prime function of the ceramics at this site rather than being manufactured as permanent, portable objects.

The later Palaeolithic sites of Moravia, the region of the Czech Republic west of Prague and north of Vienna, continue to provide remarkable new materials. To the art mobilier for which Dolní Věstonice and Pavlov have been celebrated, there has recently been added the technologies of groundstone and ceramics — and now woven materials, interlaced basketry or textiles, again of a kind one expects only from a quite later era.

What is the connection between storage and sedentism in hunter-gatherer societies? What is the pattern of ethnography? What other patterns show themselves in Late Palaeolithic Eurasia, in those late hunter-gatherer adaptations that are precursors of Holocene food production? And is material storage a necessary and a sufficient condition for hunter-gatherer sedentism?

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