Exploring Ceramic Production Past and Present

Peter van Dommelen & Miguel Ángel Cau Ontiveros

Pottery is easily the most ubiquitous and abundant category of material culture that has been preserved in the archaeological record, certainly in the Mediterranean, and probably on a global scale. For that reason alone, archaeologist must pay due attention to the ceramic remains that they excavate or pick up from the surface – and they have for the most, as ceramic studies is a well-established specialization. Despite the ubiquity of the material, however, and even if its importance is widely recognized, pottery has all too often been, and continues to be used for little more than just dating sites and deposits, or perhaps to identify commercial or gift-giving connections between regions. As a result, ceramic studies are not often seen as making their mark at the forefront of theoretical developments across the discipline as a whole.

Such a view, however, does little justice to the field of ceramic studies and its intellectual and methodological advances. Focusing specifically on the manufacturing process of pottery in all its dimensions, the broad aim of this course is to understand the role and meaning of pottery in ancient societies, or more generally precapitalist and traditional communities, and to explore the rich array of approaches and perspectives that have been marshaled to make sense of the mountains of sherds that archaeological projects tend to amass.

SVM2016-finds (7).JPG The archaeological starting-point for this course is two-fold: on the one hand there are the large quantities of pottery that are habitually collected by archaeological projects and that are testimony to the manufacturing processes that produced them. The other point of departure are the remains of actual production sites, notably kilns but also other more modest remains like wasters. In order to make sense of these material remains, we will survey and critically assess theoretical and methodological approaches to investigate the economic and social dimensions of ceramic production; we will also address the role of scientific analyses and actively apply an array of in a series of practical sessions. In doing so, we will focus primarily on the Mediterranean, but by no means restrict ourselves to this region.

In this course, we will also look well beyond the sherds themselves and turn to ethnographic and historical studies of potters, artisanal organization and ceramic production from across the Mediterranean and elsewhere in the world in order to gain a deeper understanding of ceramic production in the both the ancient and recent past.