In my fantasy setting, I'm modelling the technology that is being used after the Pre-Pottery Neolithic people, who lived in some of the earliest cities in the middle east. Catal Hoyuk in Turkey is one of the most famous PPN cities. Anyone here know anything about these people? I know that they lived in two-story houses made of clay, with the entrance on the ceiling. And as the name suggests, they didn't have pottery, so instead stored stuff in bags, gourds, etc. They farmed grain and were just starting to domesticate sheep and goats. And they buried their dead in the basement floor, and dug them up later to put their plaster-covered skulls on display for religious purposes. I'm just tired of pseudo-medieval fantasy settings, you know? I thought it would be neat to have a setting modelled after a different time period.
I've never heard of these people before, but I just read the Wikipedia page on them, and the setting sounds fascinating. In particular, I find it interesting that they had the use of some sort of plastering, and the rooftop life holds a lot of potential. Sorry I can't answer your questions, but I think you're on to a good setting.
You could do worse than look up Native American lifestyles. There's one tribe whose name refers to the fact that they didn't have pottery, so boiled water by heating pebbles in a fire and then putting them into a rawhide bag holding water.
That brings to mind something I saw on some survival show or other. They had a hollowed out section of stone, not a free-moving bowl, but more of a pit in the floor of a cave or something. Built a fire in the pit, let it burn for an hour or so to heat up the rock, then shoveled the fire (most of it, charcoal won't hurt your system) out and quickly poured water from the stream or pond or whatever into it. The heat that had built up in the rock boiled and sanitized the water. Edit: Correction, sorry, they didn't heat up the rock containers, they dropped rocks that had been heated in a fire into the water-filled pits in the rock. I had a soup cooked this way in Kyoto once, pretty nice and a really interesting tableside preparation.
