Americas' Oldest Pottery? -- Amazon Dig Unearths 7,000-Year-Old Pieces

WASHINGTON - An archaeology dig near an Amazon River fishing village has unearthed pottery fragments that are more than 7,000 years old, the most ancient ever found in the Americas, scientists said today.

Bits of red-brown pottery found in digs in Brazil at an ancient village called Taperinha have been atomically dated at 7,000 to 8,000 years old, according to a team led by Anna C. Roosevelt of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The team's findings are reported in a study published today in the journal Science.

The discovery pushes back the date of the earliest pottery discovered in the New World by a full 1,000 years, the study says.

`EARLIEST KNOWN USE'

"This would be the earliest known use of pottery in the New World," said James Richardson III, chairman of anthropology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in New York.

Pieces of pottery found in other parts of South America have been dated at 6,000 to 7,000 years old. In the U.S., pottery dated at about 4,500 years old has been found in South Carolina and Georgia.

The oldest known pottery, at about 13,000 years old, was found in Japan, Richardson said.

The Taperinha pottery was unearthed during excavation of what are called shell middens, at a site near the Amazon River. Shell middens are mounds formed by discarded debris from the harvest and processing of shellfish. Such mounds also often contain pottery shards and stone tools.

Roosevelt, conducting field work in Venezuela, could not be reached by telephone. But in a statement by her museum, she said the pottery discovery supports her theory that the Amazon flood plain was home to a civilized culture thousands of years ago.

"The accepted theory for many years was that this habitat was simply too poor, too low in resources, to support large, dense populations of plants, animals or humans," her statement said.

FLOOD-PLAIN SOIL

But the statement noted that soil in the Amazon area is of the same kind found on the flood plains of the Nile, Ganges and other rivers "where we know there were large populations and complex societies that developed over long periods of time."

Richardson said many scientists disagree with Roosevelt's view that the Amazon River basin supported a complex society. He said many experts have long believed that peoples living along the river were nomadic and less sophisticated than civilizations elsewhere in South and Central America.