Putting the Mold to the Test: The Application of Experimental Archaeology to Compare the Mold and Potter’s Wheel in Bronze Age Anatolia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Moving across Syria-Mesopotamia to Anatolia and finally to the Aegean, potters during the Bronze Age gradually began to shift their ceramic repertoire from hand-made and coil-made ceramics to wheel-made pottery. Despite this rise in innovative manufacturing technology (the potter’s wheel), some sites in Western Anatolia, namely Seyitömer Höyük, exhibit ceramics that are made using semispherical molds. Specifically, at the Seyitömer Mound archaeological evidence has suggested that potters preferred utilizing molds rather than the potter’s wheel to produce standardized pottery at a fast rate. In recent years, with the discovery of wheel-made pottery, particularly in the Levant and Aegean islands, scholars have turned their focus to assessing the fabrics of these ceramics using petrography and X-radiography for identifying forming techniques, and ethnographic studies for understanding the production and transmission of knowledge. Despite their numerous publications, these authors have heavily focused on the rise of the potter’s wheel and neglected the use of mold technology. This paper discusses preliminary results yielded from experimental archaeology with the help of traditional potters in Turkey using both the mold and potter’s wheel in order to recreate various forms of Bronze Age ceramics.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26266