While it is widely known that the production and firing of ceramic objects from Dolni Vestonice and other Pavlovian Upper Paleolithic sites in Moravia, Czechslovakia, is at least 26,000 years old, the technology of these artifacts, made some 15,000 years before pottery, have received sparse research attention. First, we counted and established a typology for the over 10,000 ceramic fragments excavated at these sites. Next we focused on the nature and variability of the ceramic technology practiced at the sites in order to understand not only the probable origins of ceramic production, but also the function of these objects as well as some of the behavior which produced them. The technological questions involved whether they were worked soils, how they were formed and whether they were transformed by firing to ceramics. The firing temperatures and microstructures of figurines were compared with those of hearths and kilns. By measurements of structure, composition, and properties, our study concludes that the making and firing of the figurines was a culturally patterned behavior integral to their use and not directed toward the production of permanent ceramic objects.