[2] In a pre-pottery context, the heating can be done by lining a pit with leather, leaves or clay, and then putting in the water followed by pot boilers directly into the vessel.
Often the broken pot boilers are discarded into middens or domestic waste deposits, which on long-established sites can amount to many tonnes of material.
[2] Reuse as building material is not impossible, but the typical small size of the fragments hinders this use.
Surface "crazing" is not restricted to pot boilers - hearth stones and the surrounds of fireplaces may also show the same structure.
However, since a pot boiler needs to be manipulated into and out of the fire (typically in anthropological observations, using sticks of green wood) at arm's length, they start off weighing up to several kilogrammes, and shrink by fragmentation ; hearth stones and chimney liners are typically larger.