Pottery: beyond the silhouette

What to look for in a description

Pottery guidance recommends recording vessel form, fabric, technology and quantities. Firing waste can help identify production. Source: M03. These methodological principles come from work on English production sites; they are not a regional dating typology transplanted to the Levant.

Separate kind and material

“Ceramic” identifies material, while “jar” or “bowl” identifies a vessel kind. Keep both fields separate when reading a description. Then ask whether the comparison concerns fabric, shape, manufacturing method or a combination.

A small looking exercise

Choose a documented photograph and read its caption first. Write down what you can see and what you know only from the source record. Then ask what connects the vessel to a place and time. Do not supply a production origin or use merely from an attractive colour or a familiar silhouette.

From a photographed sherd to an assemblage record

To move beyond a general identification, build a small table for the publication you are reading: item number, recorded context, surviving part, proposed comparison and confidence in dating. Distinguish a detail described in the report from one you infer from an image. If the author refers to a section drawing or plate, open it too: the argument about form may depend on documentation absent from a photograph of one fragment.

Now compare two possible statements in a reading exercise, not an account of an excavation: “a sherd resembling a dated type came from a fill” and “an assemblage was recorded on a floor.” Do not decide in advance that one is stronger. Ask how the fill formed, how objects relate to the floor, and whether the evidence supports the same event. The word “assemblage” does not remove the need to examine accumulation.

What the museum example contributes

The opening jar has its own collection record, S01. Identify which fields describe the object and which supply an attribution or date. Being complete and clearly photographed does not give it the excavation context of another example on this site. Use it to learn descriptive terms, without transferring its date to another fragment simply because both are called jars.

The pottery-making article develops the recording process; the materials-and-exchange article examines the distance between resemblance and shared origin. If your question is when an event happened, continue to the dating guide and first ask what links the pottery to that event.

Continue to Nazareth to ask how an assemblage enters a settlement argument, or to the dating guide. The jar shown here is an identified Bronze Age museum object, not a find from the Nazareth excavation.