Pottery Analysis, Second Edition: A Sourcebook - Hardcover

Rice, Prudence M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226923207 ISBN 13: 9780226923208

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2015

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Prudence M. Rice is professor of anthropology, associate vice chancellor for research, and director of the research development office at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Pottery Analysis

A Sourcebook, Second Edition

By Prudence M. Rice

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-92320-8

Contents

List of Figures, 
List of Tables, 
List of Boxes, 
Preface to the Second Edition, 
Preface to the First Edition, 
Note to Instructors, 
Part 1 Introduction, 
1 Pottery and Its History, 
Part 2 The Raw Materials of Pottery Making: Perspectives from Chemistry, Geology, and Engineering, 
2 Clays: Origins and Definitions, 
3 Plasticity: The Clay/Water System, 
4 Non-clay Constituents, 
5 Drying and Shrinkage, 
6 Changes in Clays with Heat, 
7 Glazes, 
Part 3 Behavior: Ethnographic Perspectives on Pottery Making, 
8 Manufacture, 
9 Surface Enhancement, 
10 Firing, 
11 Exchange and Household Provisioning, 
Part 4 Methods and Measures: Analyzing Archaeological Pottery, 
12 Methods and Theories, 
13 Classification, 
14 Characterization, 
15 Quantification and Sampling Collections, 
16 Color, 
17 Mineral and Chemical Composition, 
18 Physical and Mechanical Properties, 
19 Thermal Behavior, 
Part 5 Research Questions and Problems: Interpreting Archaeological Pottery, 
20 Production I: Location, 
21 Production II: Organization, 
22 Production III: The Products, 
23 Archaeothermometry, 
24 Style and Social Interaction, 
25 Functions and Forms, 
Part 6 Then and Now; Now and Then, 
26 The Humility of Things, 
Glossary, 
Reference List, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 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.c ulture.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 (AlO) and silica (SiO). 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.

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.

Ancient and modern pottery and ceramics are grouped into various categories called wares or bodies (table 1.2) on the basis of their composition, firing, and surface treatment (Hopper 2009: 36–39). The broadest division distinguishes unvitrified from vitrified wares depending on whether the composition and firing are such that the clay melts and fuses into a glassy (i.e., vitreous or vitrified) substance. Low-fired, unvitrified pottery includes terracottas and earthenwares; high-fired, vitrified ceramics include stonewares and porcelains.

Terracotta (It. "cooked earth") is a relatively coarse, porous ware fired at low temperatures, usually 900ºC or less. The earliest fired pottery in all areas of the world falls into this category. Terracotta vessels, figurines, sculptures, and tiles are generally not covered with a glaze, but they may exhibit various surface treatments that enhance their function and aesthetic appeal. Terracottas are often subsumed within the broader category of earthenwares.

Earthenwares also include porous, unvitrified clay bodies, but they are fired at a wide spectrum of temperatures from 800/900ºC or so up to 1100/1200ºC. Earthenwares may be glazed or unglazed; although the body itself is not vitrified, the firing temperature can be high enough to allow a glaze to form properly. This category of ceramic material includes a wide range of products, from coarse red earthenwares such as bricks and tiles (sometimes called heavy clay products) to fine earthenwares such as tin-enameled majolica, often made with more refined clay bodies. Earthenwares have served an enormous variety of household and construction purposes throughout the world for many millennia.

Stonewares are fired at temperatures of roughly 1200–1350ºC, high enough to achieve at least partial fusion or vitrification of the clay body, depending on its composition. The medium- coarse body, opaque and usually gray or light brown in color, is composed of stoneware clays, typically highly plastic sedimentary deposits low in iron. Stonewares may be unglazed or have a lead or salt glaze.

The pinnacle of the potter's art, at least in terms of technical accomplishments, was reached with the Chinese production of porcelain, a thin-walled, translucent, vitrified ceramic customarily fired at temperatures of 1280–1400ºC or higher. Porcelains are made of a white-firing, highly refractory kaolin clay (sometimes called china clay), relatively free of impurities, mixed with quartz and feldspar. During high-temperature firing the feldspar melts, giving the finished product its characteristic translucency, hardness, and melodious ring when tapped.

1.2 The Earliest Pottery

It is impossible to trace precisely the beginnings of human exploitation of the world's resources of clayey substances. Although early stone tools from Africa are more than a million years old, the oldest objects of clay that archaeologists have recovered date only in the tens of thousands of years. However, humans likely experimented with soft earthy materials considerably before this, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago, in uses as ephemeral as painting their bodies with ochre (see Wreschner 1985). Clay might have been eaten, a not-uncommon practice known as geophagy or pica, claimed to add nutrients and remove toxins (e.g., Knishinsky 1998; Young 2012), the latter a form of self-medication. But the essential feature in the history of clay technology is the application of heat to transform this soft, malleable material into something hard and durable. A relatively recent achievement by the yardstick of prehistory, it is this transformation that allows broken bits of pottery to survive millennia and come into archaeologists' hands for study.

Any discussion of the history of pottery and ceramics must begin with the recognition of clay itself as a useful resource (table 1.3). Clay is certainly one of the most abundant, cheap, and adaptable raw materials available for human exploitation. Early archaeological evidence for its use includes slabs found near a hearth in a Middle Paleolithic cave in Monaco, perhaps used for grilling meat (Hayden 2010: 19), and the lining of a hearth 34,000–32,000 years ago in Greece (Karkanas et al. 2004). More common findings appear as part of the diverse artistic expressions of the Upper Paleolithic period of central and western Europe. Many Paleolithic caves have designs traced into wet clay on walls and floors, in addition to the more familiar animal paintings. At the Tuc d'Audoubert cave in France two modeled bison were found, formed of unfired clay. The famous "Venuses" — female figurines with exaggerated sexual characteristics — include specimens formed of fired and unfired clay from Dolní Vestoniçi in Czechoslovakia; dating around 25,000–30,000 years ago, some were made of clay mixed with crushed mammoth bone (Vandiver et al. 1989). Other Late Paleolithic central Eurasian sites have yielded thousands of "anthropomorphic figurines, zoomorphic statuettes, pellets, 'earplugs', flat fragments and 'structural ceramic'" (Budja 2010: 507).

These examples suggest that by 25,000 years ago, three significant principles of clay use were already widely known. One is that moist clay is plastic: it can be shaped and formed and will retain that form when dried. Another principle is that fire hardens clay. A third is that adding various substances to clay can improve its properties and usefulness. The application of these principles to create durable containers was a significant technological innovation.

1.2.1 Pottery Containers: Why Pots?

The appearance of pottery vessels in the archaeological record has long been considered a major marker in human "progress." In nineteenth-century evolutionary schemes, pottery was interpreted as marking the movement of human societies from "Upper Savagery" into "Lower Barbarism" (Morgan 1877). Later, pottery was seen as part of the "Neolithic technocomplex": an assemblage of tools for obtaining, preparing, and storing food, plus the associated technologies of their manufacture and use, that accompanied changes in lifeways during the Pleistocene/Holocene transition. These changes included the adoption of food production rather than collecting, along with settlement in permanent villages instead of temporary encampments. In contemporary thinking these transformations have been decoupled and each is seen as highly complex, occurring over several millennia and at different times and in different ways in different areas.

Indeed, the origins of pottery — the beginnings of the use of clay to make fired containers — are far more complicated than they would seem. For archaeologists, the interesting questions are not solely about the when and where but also the why and how: How was it learned that clay could be shaped into hollow containers? Was the early pottery in a given site or area an independent invention or inspired by another group? How was it discovered that fire-hardened clay had both utilitarian uses and social functions? Did these processes co-occur or were they independent? A particularly interesting question concerns whether early pottery containers represent a "practical" or a "prestige" technology (Hayden 1998).

Unfortunately, simple answers to these kinds of how and why questions in archaeology are not easy to come by. Multiple rather than single causes are more probable explanations for almost all early cultural developments; thus the beginnings of pottery may be a consequence of numerous lines of experimentation and accumulation of practical experience. Issues relating to the innovation and innovators of this new technology, along with its sharing, copying, adoption, and dispersal, intermingle varying combinations of both similar or general and dissimilar/specific (localized) circumstances.

1.2.1.1 Hunting-Gathering-Foraging-Collecting

Accumulating evidence for the presence of pottery among non-sedentary peoples is of particular interest (table 1.4). Considerable research during the past few decades has shed light on early clay use and pottery origins as well as the earliest expressions of emerging societal complexity (see e.g., D. Arnold 1985: 119–20; J. Arnold 1996; Barnett and Hoopes 1995; Eerkens et al. 2002; Freestone and Gaimster 1997; Jordan and Zvelebil 2010a; Mack 1990; Saunders and Hays 2004). Pottery does not seem to have originated in any single time and place in human history. Rather, it is evident that, after the close of the Last Glacial Maximum, about 20,000 years ago (Clark et al. 2009), pottery began to be independently invented in a thus-far unknown number of centers in both hemispheres among non-sedentary, nonagricultural groups.

The "back story" in this process involves considerable rethinking of the nature of hunter-gatherer societies, particularly those at the close of the Pleistocene and during the Pleistocene/Holocene transition. Various studies have discussed subsistence and settlement strategies, with some agreement that "hunting and gathering" (including fishing) can be differentiated into foraging and collecting systems (Binford 1980). Foragers are characterized by broad-spectrum resource use and relatively high mobility (Bettinger 2010; Kelly 2013); collectors focus on a more limited range of items and exhibit relatively lower mobility. The nature of residential mobility itself is being rethought (Kelly 1992), with distinctions framed in terms of seasonal patterns of settlement or circulating versus radiating settlement (Lieberman 1993) on the basis of the longer and larger semi-sedentary residence in base camp/macroband settlements. Such extended occupations are found in areas with greater seasonal availability of highly productive foodstuffs, and are associated with the intensification of resource use. Finally, subsistence variability among these groups may be differentiated into time-minimizing and energy-maximizing (Bettinger 2001) and storing versus nonstoring economies (Testart 1982; see also Ingold 1983), and as delayed-return versus immediate-return consumption patterns (Dale et al. 2004; Woodburn 1982).

In other words, hunting-gathering-fishing-foraging-collecting systems are now understood to be more complex than originally conceived. Some settlements display archaeological signatures of sedentarization, loss of egalitarianism and emergence of social ranking, and increasing societal complexity, for which reasons the residents are labeled complex, affluent, and/or transegalitarian hunter-gatherer-collectors. And in terms of material culture, it is among these groups that very early pottery was frequently manufactured and used. Several general scenarios can be proposed to explain this development.

1.2.1.2 Hypotheses and Models

One explanation calls attention to the need for storage of food surpluses resulting from intensification of certain resources in storing or delayed-return economies. Storing economies tend to be more common in areas of strong seasonality in resource availability (relating to both kinds and amounts, and to problems of spoilage). Hence they are generally rare at low latitudes (below c. 28º N latitude) and in deserts and tropics, and more common at higher latitudes and in temperate climes (Rice 1999: 34–35). If pottery containers began among complex, storing hunter-gatherers with the need for safe, rodent-proof, long-term storage facilities for surpluses — or for caching foodstuff at various locations in their movements across a landscape (Ingold 1983) — this suggests that early pottery was a "practical" technology (see Hayden 1998: 17).

The most common and traditional explanation for pottery containers is a "culinary hypothesis," in which pottery manufacture and use are entangled with the domestication of grains and animals and establishment of sedentary village life as part of a "Neolithic Revolution" (Childe 1936: 93–94; cf. Vitelli 1989). Although this specific correlation can no longer be supported, it is likely that pottery originated as — and has continued to be — part of women's work in the kitchen (see Crown and Wills 1995: 245–48; Rice 1991b; Skibo and Schiffer 1995; Wright 1991; also Vincentelli 2004). Clay-lined fire pits, for example, would call attention to the durability and impermeability of the burned clay and the advantages of portable containers (see Karkanas et al. 2004). Sun-dried clay slabs could have held dry goods such as grains, seeds, or nuts for toasting. Clay might have been used to line baskets (e.g., Wormington and Neal 1951) and then, after the basket was set too close to a fire and burned, the hardened lining was found to be useful itself. In many parts of the world the earliest pottery vessels known archaeologically are skeuomorphs, in forms or with decoration resembling containers of perishable basketry, netting, gourds, wood, animal skin, and so on (Joesink-Mandeville 1973; Speck 1931; see also Doumani and Franchetti 2012; Russell 1991). Women were likely intimately familiar with these technologies.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226923207
• ISBN 13: 9780226923208
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 592