The Potter's Keeper

By Kevin Cochrane

Have you ever wondered why your cell phone doesn’t have an antenna anymore? What did the Spanish do with all that New World gold and what’s up with the Neanderthals?

Inspired by globe-circling travels, Cochrane shows how the crude pottery made by cavemen is directly related to modern day space exploration. It’s Freakonomics meets the DaVinci Code!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kevin Cochrane
• Release date: May 3, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452487366

Kevin Cochrane

Kevin Cochrane has a witty and informed perspective that allows him to identify surprising themes running through history. Developed through his 20 years as an economics professor, Cochrane’s classes are known as “rock n’ roll without music.” In addition to appearing regularly on TV to explain current economic trends, as well as frequently writing newspaper columns, he was finally persuaded to write a book tracing economic development in a way that only he can do. He and his wife currently divide their time between homes in Grand Junction and New Orleans.

Book preview

Preface

I’m not certain of the difference between a Preface and a Forward. That’s probably why I didn’t major in English when I went to college. And as simple as that choice seems for many, it’s precisely the sort of question that steered me towards the Dismal Science.

While Thomas Carlyle coined that phrase to describe economics in 1839, and it’s pretty much lived up to its moniker for centuries, these days it’s not quite as accurate. With popular books like Freakonomics making best seller lists and economics reigning as one of the most popular college majors, the subject has become a mainstream fascination for millions.

It’s with this spirit in mind that it seemed only appropriate to me that someone should tackle the economic history of the world. It also seemed only right that most normal people would find the subject incredibly boring and never read it. The problem I faced was how to take 25,000 years of tedious economic development and make it seem as exciting as a television reality show.

When most people of reasonable intellect hear the word economics they think of graphs and mathematics. I know that’s what I think and I don’t even have reasonable intellect. Combine those mind numbing complex formulas with dry historical anecdotes and it’s a sure-fire recipe for a best selling sleep aid. No, there had to be a way to bring reality television into the mix and that’s where I figured some fiction would help since I could just make up exciting stories.

I hit on the idea of tracing world economic development by telling it through the eyes of fictional characters. It would all be accurate historically, except the economic actors in these stories would be creations of mine that were woven from the real stories of many. Besides, just like on many of my college exams, it’s always easier to just make stuff up!

It also seemed to me that the best way to trace the growth of money and markets was to identify a commodity that spanned pretty much all of civilization and create historically accurate fictions about its role in economic development. I’ve often been intrigued by archeologists’ stories of finding pottery shards dating back for millennia and using those pieces to reconstruct a historical picture. To me ceramics is like a river that never runs dry and flows through the centuries linking generation to generation and empire to empire. It also didn’t hurt that my wife is a potter and over the years I’d accumulated a few useful vocabulary words like kiln and glaze (and broken and cracked and damn!). Likewise, it turns out that ceramics really did play a major role in economic development, which was handy for me and also kept domestic peace around our household.

Yes, there are brief sections where we have to discuss a few economic principles, but only to lay the groundwork for a better understanding of what’s happening in the storyline and to demonstrate that I actually paid attention in class. Mostly though, I’ll tell individual stories that trace the history of trade through the eyes of Spanish olive growers at the birth of Christ, and you’ll hear tales about the ways of the market from clever Chinese traders in the Ming Dynasty. You’ll even rub shoulders with a British Lord in Victorian England and live through the end of slavery after the Civil War. Most of the characters I write about are pure fiction, but the economic events surrounding them are real and through that combination I tell the story of world economic development. Doesn’t that sound fun?

Without further strained justification and nervous explanation, let’s get some of those economic principles out of the way and start hearing tales of Roman fraud and Mongolian currency manipulation. One item to note is that dates after the end of B.C. are referred to in this book as the current era or CE, not A.D. Logically, it then follows that the years before CE are referred to as BCE, not B.C. My apologies to my Christian and Jewish friends, but I always found BC and AD to be as confusing as Preface and Forward.

- One -

FREE TRADE? IT’S SO SIMPLE A CAVEMAN COULD DO IT!

Snow was falling as the hair covered man crept slowly through the trees. We’ll call him Thor because we’re not really certain that he had a given name. His eyes were focused on one, and only one, thing. The rabbit he’d tracked for miles was now cornered between some rocks and was destined to soon become dinner. With a single arching swoop of his shoulder the man threw his weapon and his aim was true. He would eat today.

The weapon used by Thor was a crude stone tipped spear he’d fashioned about a year earlier and he always seemed to be successful when it was thrown. He usually hunted larger animals because he could eat longer from their meat, but winter had come early this year and driven the mammoths out of the surrounding territory. Yes, Thor was a Neanderthal and this was about 25,000 years ago – just about the time his species was becoming extinct after dominating the earth for over half of a million years.

When he’d finished feasting on the rabbit and some wild grasses growing nearby (what’s a balanced diet without roughage?), he returned to the camp where he lived along with several fellow and female cave dwellers. Many of them were hungry, but the thought to share his food, even with his children or their mother, never occurred to him or to them. Neanderthal life was all about survival of the fittest.

They didn’t have third grade back then so Neanderthals never learned about share time. Nobody brought dolls or toy trucks to show-and-tell, nobody waited their turn at kickball and nobody traded a ham & cheese for peanut butter and jelly (and it wasn’t because of peanut allergies). If you killed an animal you ate it. You didn’t take it back to the cave to pass around for others to enjoy, and you didn’t trade it with another hunter for meat you liked better. What Thor didn’t know when he fell asleep with a full stomach was that the idea of survival of the fittest, and even his entire species, were both about to become things of the past.

Anthropologists and biologists have several theories about why the 500,000 year existence of the Neanderthal came to an end. Most of these ideas revolve around a Darwinian approach that implies some type of biological natural selection process that favored the rising breed of Homo sapiens who were better suited to the changing environment. A few even suggest interbreeding between the species, which I’ve always found personally fun, and that the surviving offspring inherited the genetically dominant Homo sapiens’ traits, but again, that’s biological selection.

The first recognized society of Homo sapiens to appear around the time of the Neanderthal’s demise was the Gravettian. These were the first folks to have biological traits like us and evidence of their existence started showing up in southern France around 25,000 years ago. They were smaller than Neanderthals like Thor, they had smaller foreheads and biologists can tell you all sorts of other differences that better adapted them to survive over their predecessor species. But they also had a few key non-biological differences as well.

A Neanderthal’s daily life was simple. Only two things mattered, hunting and sex - not a bad existence! Everything in their lives was focused on fulfilling these two objectives because, essentially, these two things took up all the time they had in the day. They didn’t farm or

Reviews for The Potter's Keeper

[danialexis · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kevin Cochrane's The Potter's Keeper explores basic economics by following a little-considered yet key trend throughout human history: ceramics. By examining how ceramics were developed, used, and traded, the book teaches economics and the history of pottery by enthralling the reader with tales of days gone by.The Potter's Keeper begins in 25,000 BCE, where Cochrane, a professor of economics, theorizes that the Neanderthals died out and Homo sapiens came to rule the day because the latter group figured out how to make ceramic pots, while the former did not. With ceramic pots, Homo sapiens had a way to trade food and other goods – because they could now be measured by the pot-load – and also had an impetus for developing a division of labor system, in which some people obtained food for the group while others worked on making or trading other implements. Neanderthals lacked both these skills, however, making theirs an “each Neanderthal hunts for him- or herself” group that could not survive in the long term, much less form a cohesive society. (Although Cochrane doesn't mention it, this theory conforms cleanly to Darwin's theories, which also propose that species in general, and human beings in particular, often have a greater chance of survival when they cooperate within the group.)After its humble beginnings in a fictional yet plausible prehistory, The Potter's Keeper pushes forward in time, tracing the development and refinement of pottery through such high points in history as the Roman Empire, which developed the world's first landfill with a dump site containing millions of shattered ceramic vessels, and the Ming dynasty, where Chinese artists created and painted porcelain pieces of extraordinary beauty. The book also explores the effects on pottery in the American Civil War and during the Reconstruction period immediately after, when the potters who were once enslaved on Southern plantations had to enter the ceramics market as a whole, or perish. Cochrane even presents a view of a future in which ceramics – as components of spacefaring vessels that can withstand heat and pressure that would melt most metals – make travel into deep space a reality.The Potter's Keeper is an engaging and thoroughly readable introduction to basic economics, as well as a unique tale exploring the history and art of ceramics. The book has a few flaws, including some awkwardly-phrased sentences and obviously poor production values, but these – most likely the mistakes of an inattentive editor – are easily overlooked by the pace and details of the stories within, both of which fascinate. A fun, quick read for students from middle school onwards or for anyone interested in pottery, history, or economics.

[iwatson_39 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

First of all, when I asked for this book to review I envisioned a chronological book about pottery, how ancient pottery was made, and historical facts about the society during that time. In a sense, this is what the book is about but more importantly there is an underlying message of how pottery and ceramics have shaped and changed economics. I had to step back and refocus on what I was going to get out of the book and I'm happy to say I wasn't disappointed.One important fact that struck me was Cochrane's chapter about globalization. We often hear the term that our world is getting smaller, but he says "The world isn't actually getting physically smaller, it's getting faster." This is beyond the visual three dimensions but is in the fourth dimension of time. Using eBay as an example, Cochrane reminds us we can view the item online today, order/pay for it tomorrow, and it could arrive the next day via air freight. Gone are the days of pony express where it would take days, maybe even weeks or months to arrive. Let's face it, we are in a very fast paced world where size of the world doesn't matter anymore. It's all relevant. Unlike other books on economics, "The Potter's Keeper" allows the reader to see our progression with another set of eyes. Using pottery and ceramics as the base, Cochrane's viewpoint is understandable and plausible, and just gives enough information for us to form our own ideas and/or do more research.