10 - Making Pottery

Summary

Introduction

Understanding the process whereby the raw materials of ceramics are transformed into finished ceramic products is a necessary precursor to the examination of both the products themselves and the remains of the manufacturing sites.

To set up any system of ceramic classification requires knowledge of the underlying physical characteristics of the raw materials, an understanding of how they are affected by all stages of the manufacturing process and the ability to recognise and correctly identify the traces of these actions.

Our knowledge of the pottery-manufacturing process comes from a variety of sources.Materials science provides detailed information on the behaviour of clay and other materials under a wide range of conditions, in particular when they are mixed with water or heated to a high temperature. Basic textbooks on ceramic materials (e.g. Kingery et al. 1976; Grimshaw 1980; Worrall 1986; Carter and Norton 2007) or briefer descriptions written from an archaeological standpoint (Shepard 1956, 6–48; Rice 1987, 31–110) may be consulted for the physical and chemical background to the pottery-manufacturing process. The investigative techniques of materials science have been applied to particular aspects of pre-industrial pottery (Bronitsky 1986, but see Sillar and Tite 2000).