Humans have used fire for at least half a million years, and possibly a million or more years (Brain and Sillen, 1988; James, 1989; Weiner et al., 1998; Goren-Inbar et al., 2004). During this entire period, the most common use of fire was presumably for cooking food, for producing light and warmth, and for protection. It was only about 15,000 to possibly 18,000 years ago that fire was used for the first time to produce synthetic materials: plaster in the southern Levant (Kingery et al., 1988; Valla et al., 2007) and ceramics in south China and Japan (Yasuda, 2002; Boaretto et al., 2009c). All deliberate uses of fire by humans are referred to here as pyrotechnology. This behavior is one of the unique attributes of our species. Pyrotechnological practices are therefore of much interest when reconstructing human behavior.

Pyrotechnology is based on the fact that heat causes a usually atomically ordered natural material to lose its order, change its form, and then, on cooling, adopt another arrangement of atoms that results in the new material having different properties. Cooking is perhaps the most widespread and ancient form of pyrotechnology. In the case of plaster, ceramics, metals, and glasses, the new material can also be conveniently shaped. The shaping capability, together with the advantageous material properties, are the main functional and/or aesthetic benefits of producing traditional synthetic materials.