Pottery is the most common find on almost any ancient settlement, and the potter’s wheel is the tool that changed how much of it could be made. The wheel did not create pottery, which is far older, and many cultures made excellent ceramics without it. What the wheel offered was speed and regular shapes, and that mattered most where cities needed large numbers of standard containers.
Pottery before the wheel
Pots can be built entirely by hand. Common methods include pinching a lump of clay into shape, building up a vessel from coils, and joining slabs. Hand-building can produce very fine work, and some of the oldest known pottery was made this way. The Jomon pottery of Japan, decorated with cord-marked and applied patterns, is among the earliest known ceramic traditions in the world, with dates that stretch back more than ten thousand years. In the Pacific, the Lapita culture made decorated pottery by hand and carried it across island chains.
A simple turntable, sometimes called a slow wheel or tournette, helped potters rotate a pot as they built it, and it is found before the true fast wheel. It speeds up shaping and allows more even walls, but the potter still builds the vessel rather than throwing it.
The fast wheel
True wheel-throwing means spinning a heavy wheel fast enough that centrifugal force helps the potter lift and shape a lump of clay from the centre. This technique is generally associated with Mesopotamia, and it appears to have developed there during the fourth millennium BCE and become well established by around 3000 BCE. Scholars do not agree on the precise stages or on whether the idea arose in one place, and the evidence is complicated by the fact that wheel marks can be hard to read on fragments.
From there wheel-thrown pottery appears in many regions at different times. It is found in Egypt by the third millennium BCE, in Bronze Age Crete and the wider Aegean, in the Indus cities, and in China, where the fine thin-walled wares of the Longshan period show remarkable skill. Not every society took it up. The pottery of the Americas before European contact was built by coiling, moulding and similar methods, and ceramics there reached great sophistication without a wheel.
What the wheel changed
The wheel made workshops more productive. A skilled potter could throw many pots in a short time, with more regular size and shape, and standardised vessels were easier to stack, store and trade. In the Indus Valley cities, large quantities of wheel-made pottery with standardised forms point to specialised production. The Harappan civilization is not the only example, but it shows well how a uniform product supported large settlements.
Wheel work also changed labour. A thrower, a clay preparer, a fuel supplier and a kiln tender might each contribute, which tended to move pottery production from the household into dedicated workshops. Not all pottery followed this path, and household production continued alongside it in many regions.
Firing and kilns
Pottery has to be fired to become permanent. Early firing was done in open bonfires or pits, but kilns, which separate the fire from the pots, give better control of temperature and atmosphere. Greek potters produced their famous red and black wares by controlling the air supply in the kiln so that the surface changed colour at different stages, a process of oxidising, then reducing, then re-oxidising conditions that was carried out with great skill.
Different clays, temperatures and surface treatments produced different results, from coarse cooking pots to fine tablewares with a gloss or slip. Etruscan potters made the black, polished bucchero pottery, and Roman potters produced a red-gloss tableware on a very large scale, often using moulds for decoration.
What vessels tell us about daily life
Because pottery breaks but does not rot, sherds are the everyday record of a settlement. Their shapes and wear show how they were used.
- Cooking pots are often rounded, coarse and sooted, built to handle heat.
- Storage jars and large transport amphorae held grain, oil, wine, fish sauce and other goods. Many have stamps or painted marks naming makers, contents or origins.
- Tableware and drinking vessels show how people ate and drank together. Greek cups and mixing bowls are part of the Greek symposium, and Roman dining sets reflect Roman diet and etiquette.
- Lamps, figurines and ritual vessels point to religion and household custom.
Some finds suggest administration. In the Uruk period of Mesopotamia, vast numbers of crude, mass-produced bevelled-rim bowls have been found, and a common though debated interpretation links them to the distribution of rations. In Rome, a hill of discarded oil amphorae known as Monte Testaccio shows how much olive oil was shipped to the city, with the total counted in tens of millions of vessels.
Pottery as a dating tool
Archaeologists use ceramics as a clock. Styles change over time, so pottery seriation orders assemblages by the changing popularity of forms and decoration, and stamped handles and fine wares can provide dates of use. Radiocarbon dating of organic residue or associated material then helps anchor the sequence. Ceramics also move through trade, so a vessel found far from its source can point to contacts between regions. Taken together, the wheel and the pot are among the most informative technologies for reconstructing how ordinary people lived.