Smashing Pots

This is interesting:

In Denmark it is a good sign to find your door heaped with a pile of broken dishes at New Years. Old dishes are saved year around to throw them at the homes where their friends live on New Years Eve. Many broken dishes were a symbol that you have many friends.

Because this is a very old custom, going back to the Neolithic. Above are some reassembled pots from a Bell Beaker site of the early Bronze Age, all of which were intentionally smashed.

Here is some smashed pottery a 2700-year-old pit that I helped dig up a few years ago on the Potomac. This pit contained three smashed pots. I think they were ritually broken; why else would three nearly complete broken pots be in a pit that absolutely was not a grave?

It seems that for as long as people have been making pottery, they have been smashing it up to mark special occasions.