In ancient times asbestos as a temper in ceramics was imported hundreds of kilometers away. This gives us a unique opportunity to study cultural contacts among distant areas. In a hundred of years of study archaeologists of Finland, Sweden, Norway and northwestern regions of Russia worked out several detailed typological and chronological schemes for asbestos-tempered ceramics. Several research projects were also carried out to study the type of asbestos used in different areas. Although the correlation between the distribution of asbestos deposits and the distribution of asbestos-tempered pottery in different periods of the past is still poorly studied and the conclusions are mostly relative. Asbestos-tempered pottery seems to be a unique phenomenon to study the cultural contacts according to the cases of import. Besides, such a rare case of imported temper may tell much about the role of tradition in ancient pottery manufacturing.