Discussions of the emergence of pottery have often focused on the development of durable vessels among sedentary societies. However, there is increasing appreciation of the fact that early pottery was sometimes used by mobile groups, such as Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in East Asia and perhaps Late Neolithic pastoral nomads in the Near East. Pottery that was not intended to have a long use-life, i.e. disposable pottery, could have been used to resolve some of the conflicts between pottery production and a mobile way of life, including scheduling conflicts, length of production episodes, portability and scale of production.