Pottery Analysis, Second Edition

A Sourcebook

Prudence M. Rice

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226923222
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Just as a single pot starts with a lump of clay, the study of a piece's history must start with an understanding of its raw materials. This principle is the foundation of Pottery Analysis, the acclaimed sourcebook that has become the indispensable guide for archaeologists and anthropologists worldwide. By grounding current research in the larger history of pottery and drawing together diverse approaches to the study of pottery, it offers a rich, comprehensive view of ceramic inquiry.This new edition fully incorporates more than two decades of growth and diversification in the fields of archaeological and ethnographic study of pottery. It begins with a summary of the origins and history of pottery in different parts of the world, then examines the raw materials of pottery and their physical and chemical properties. It addresses ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological perspectives on pottery production; reviews the methods of studying pottery's physical, mechanical, thermal, mineralogical, and chemical properties; and discusses how proper analysis of artifacts can reveal insights into their culture of origin. Intended for use in the classroom, the lab, and out in the field, this essential text offers an unparalleled basis for pottery research.

Part 1

Introduction

Instead of thinking of our pile of artifacts as our prison, we should consider it a key to unlocking a humanity that only we can access.

Skibo 2009: 40

The history of manufacture and use of pottery encompasses roughly twenty thousand years. Worldwide, pottery began to be made and used in many different times and places, likely as practical containers in some and as prestige or ritual items in others. Throughout this history, ceramic products have been studied from varied points of view, including artistic, aesthetic, archaeological, historical, classificatory, mechanical, mineralogical, and chemical. Appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of early Chinese porcelains stimulated Islamic potters to try to reproduce them in the ninth century. The antiquarianism of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance centuries fostered interest in collecting Greek and Roman vases and an awareness of early civilizations and their achievements. Mineralogical and chemical experiments by early modern European potters and scientists trying to imitate Chinese porcelains led to improvements in their own manufactures, such as bone china.

Modern archaeological investigations have generally devoted considerable attention to ceramics in their reports, and this is true for myriad reasons. An obvious one is pottery’s long history and recovery in virtually all parts of the world, its presence rarely limited by geological or environmental situations or conditions of preservation. Pottery is essentially nonperishable as a function of its physical properties: although a pot may break, its fragments may survive for millennia. Potsherds are not particularly appealing to looters of archaeological sites, unlike chipped stone projectile points, and thus are less likely to be selectively removed; unfortunately, however, the same cannot be said of intact vessels found in tombs or other special contexts.

Finally, pottery is formed and informed: pottery making is an additive process in which the successive steps are recorded in the final product. The shape, decoration, composition, and manufacturing methods of pottery, when considered in light of contexts of recovery, reveal insights into its uses and hence into human behavior and the history of civilizations. Potters’ decisions about raw materials, shapes to be constructed, and kinds and locations of ornamentation all stand revealed, as do cooking methods, refuse disposal patterns, and occasional evidence of clumsiness and errors in judgment. The sensitivity, spatial as well as temporal, of pottery to changes in such culturally conditioned decisions has fed archaeologists’ traditional dependency on this material for defining prehistoric cultures and their interrelations.

Archaeologists’ and anthropologists’ attention has increasingly turned to pottery manufacture and use among groups being rapidly incorporated into the global economy. In both hemispheres the traditional craft of the potter, often a household livelihood passed down from generation to generation within a family, is suffering at the hands of modernization and industrial capitalism. Plastic and metal utensils are relentlessly usurping the utilitarian functions of jars and bowls formerly made of clay, because these new materials result in cheaper, more durable products. Although traditional peoples everywhere likely believed that water is more refreshing when cooled in a porous terracotta jar or beans are more flavorful when cooked in an earthenware pot, indulging these preferences is more and more difficult as potters abandon their profession to “progress” and the global economy.

Modern ceramic industries, sensitive to the needs of a technologically oriented society, now produce ovenware, flameware, and freezer-to-stovetop cooking utensils, plumbing fixtures, refractory brick for steel furnaces, dentures, and containers for radioactive waste. Meanwhile, the dwindling numbers of traditional potters turn to producing flowerpots, ashtrays, and figurines for a tourist market that too often has little appreciation for the dignity and history of their art. Fortunately, the value of studying contemporary potters and their products has not gone unrecognized, as an aid to archaeological interpretation of the distant past, as a key technology in human interactions with their environment, and as a means for many peoples to recover part of their heritage before it is irrevocably lost.

1 Pottery and Its History

There is in pottery a thread of connection with the earliest traditions of civilization and culture. Pottery forms, even simple ones like cups or plates, still symbolize for us in a particularly direct way some of the most fundamental of human activities.

Rhodes 1973: xviii

Pottery and ceramics can be conceptualized as artificial stone, the first synthetic material created by humans thousands of years ago. Familiar kinds of ceramics include containers and art objects of terracotta, earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain. Less obviously, perhaps, ceramics also encompass bricks, roof and floor tiles, sewer pipe, glass, and vitreous plumbing fixtures, as well as cements and plasters, abrasives, refractories, dentures, enameled metals, insulation and conduction parts, braking devices, space-shuttle tiles, and electronics. Surgeons now routinely make use of bioceramics: materials that can bond to living human tissue and are useful for implants and prostheses (Hench 2013). Out of early mixtures of earth, water, fire, and air, pottery transformed a range of human endeavors, from ancient cuisine to modern medicine and space exploration.

1.1 Pottery and Ceramics: Definitions and Products

The term ceramic comes from keramikós, a reference to Kéramos, mortal son of Greek gods Dionysos and Ariadne. Kéramos was lord of the potters’ district (Kerameikos) outside the main gate of Athens, which was the site of an ancient cemetery and location of excellent potters’ clay (kéramos) used to make the famous Attic vases of Greece (Harrison 2012: 22–23; http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/DionysosFamily.html#Attika; http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/3/eh351.jsp?obj_id=2392). Although in popular usage ceramics denotes things made of fired clay, the word has two sets of overlapping meanings, one set common to materials science and another employed in art and archaeology, which complicate its precise definition and usage.

In modern materials science and industry, ceramics is a generic term for an inorganic crystalline compound combining a metal with a nonmetal. Historically, most ceramics are clay-based materials composed primarily of alumina (Al₂O₃) and silica (SiO₂). Today’s advanced ceramics, however, may be compounds based on oxides of magnesium, calcium, titanium, iron, zirconium, and other elements in the absence of clay. These materials have extreme mechanical and thermal properties allowing them to serve in aerospace, nuclear, and electronics industries (see, e.g., Aldinger and Weberruss 2010). Thus ceramics may refer either to the entire range of compounds of metals and nonmetals or slightly more restrictively to materials—including noncrystalline glasses—manufactured from silicates and hardened by applying heat. In these usages, the term also encompasses the research and applied fields developed around these materials, that is, ceramic science, ceramic engineering, and ceramic industry, which are concerned with the manufacture of structural, refractory, electronic, and glass products. Pottery, one of the industries within the overall ceramic field (table 1.1), is primarily devoted to low- and high-fired tableware and utensils.

Table 1.1 Principal Ceramic Industries

Industry	Product
Structural ceramics	Bricks, tiles, drainpipes, concrete
Pottery	Terracotta
	Earthenware, glazed and unglazed
	Stoneware
	“China” tableware
	Porcelain
Refractories	Fireclay bricks, crucibles
Glass	Glasses, glazes
Advanced ceramics	Electronics, refractories, biomedical devices, abrasives, semi- and superconductors, insulators

In art and archaeology the term ceramics usually excludes construction or industrial products and conforms more closely to dictionary definitions, which emphasize clay working and the plastic arts. Within these fields, ceramics generally refers to cooking and serving utensils and objets d’art manufactured of clay. Even here the term is sometimes employed more specifically to distinguish high-fired, usually glazed, and vitrified ceramics from pottery: low-fired, unvitrified objects and/or cooking and storage vessels. In Asian studies an even finer distinction may be made, whereby ceramics denotes glazed and vitrified material (such as stoneware) intermediate technologically between low-fired pottery and high-fired translucent porcelain.

In terms of these several criteria of function, firing, and composition, archaeologists and anthropologists investigating clay-based goods produced by traditional or nonindustrial methods treat only a subset of the diverse field of ceramics. A rigid distinction between ceramics and pottery is often difficult to maintain, but, given the broad range of meanings, the bulk of material treated by anthropologists and archaeologists is generally more properly referred to as pottery.

Table 1.2 Ceramic Bodies and Their Characteristics

Body Type	Porosity	Firing Range	Typical Applications	Comment
Terracotta	High: 30% or more	Well below 1000°C	Flowerpots, roof tiles, bricks, most archaeological pottery	Unglazed, coarse, and porous; often red-firing
Earthenware	Usually 10–25%	Wide: 900–1200°C	Coarse: drainpipes, filters, tiles, bricks	Glazed or unglazed; body nonvitrified
			Fine: wall and floor tiles, majolicas
Stoneware	0.5–2.0%	ca. 1200–1350°C	Glazed drainpipes, roof tiles, tableware, artware	Glazed or unglazed; vitrified body
“China”	Low: usually less than 1%	1100–1200...