Pottery

From earliest times pots of various shapes and functions were commonly used to store and transport food, beverages, offerings, and precious materials. Pottery was so ubiquitous and widespread that, in terms of volume, it represents the largest find of any archaeological excavation (Bourriau, Nicholson, and Rose 2000: 144). The importance of pottery as a potential guide through ancient chronology was already understood in the late nineteenth century (Petrie 1901: 4-8; 1920: 3-4); the way in which it was studied, however, remained virtually unchanged for nearly a century, until a wave of modern studies (e. g., Bietak 1968; Nordstrom 1972; Holthoer 1977) gave life to a new approach to the subject (Arnold 1976; Arnold and Bourriau 1993). Great attention is paid nowadays to recording the properties of the fabric, conventionally divided into ‘‘Nile silt’’ and ‘‘marl’’ clays: the former come from deposits left by the river over the millennia, and produce red to brown pots; the latter come from calcareous deposits and produce creamy white to greenish pots (Bourriau, Nicholson and Rose 2000: 121-2; 129-35).

A careful study of the aspect of the pot or its fragments (see, for example, Bourriau, Nicholson and Rose 2000: fig: 5.4) allows a better understanding of the criteria that guided the choice of the raw material and of the method originally used to shape it. After soaking and trampling the clay (Holthoer 1977: 11-13; Arnold 1993: fig. 3a), a varying amount ofcoarse material was added in order to improve the resistance ofthe final product to thermal shocks, a particularly useful characteristic in case the pot was meant to be used as a crucible, a cooking vessel, or a water cooler (Woods 1986; Arnold 1985: 23-9).

The earliest method for shaping a pot was by hand, either with the help of a spatula (cfr. Nicholson 1995), or by joining together coils or rings of clay (for instance, Bourriau 1981: 18), with or without the help of a turntable. Pots might also be moulded, or thrown from a wheel, a technique introduced in the Fifth Dynasty which rapidly became the most commonly used (Hope 1981; Arnold 1993: 41-79; Powell 1995). The pots were then fired either on bonfires, or in the more controlled environment of up-draught kilns, and then left to cool until ready for use (Soukiassian et al. 1990: vii-xii, 49 onwards).