“Ceramics.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Biblical Studies, edited by C. Matthews. New York: Oxford University Press. (original) (raw)

Ceramics offer insights into human behaviors, technologies, and economies in a way that is currently unmatched by any other class of artifact. The term ceramics, which comes from the Greek adjective κεραμικός or keramikos, meaning “[made] of pottery,” refers to materials made of fired clay. Clay pottery was used in the storing, preparing, cooking, and serving of food and drink. Pots were also used in personal and ritual contexts because of their functional and symbolic properties, from holding perfumes and makeup to performing ritual libations or burials. Wet clay is an elastic material that was worked or molded into a variety of other forms to make decorative tiles, game pieces, or sculpture of various scales. Ceramic was used to facilitate many commercial activities, notably overland and sea trade, and also to make industrial structures, including kilns and other ovens, roofing materials, and water systems. Ceramic had many other practical purposes and was used to make loom weights and lamps. Objects made of fired clay are breakable, but their material is nearly indestructible—they do not, under normal circumstances, decompose, and fired clay is not easily recycled. Therefore, ceramic objects are ubiquitous in archaeological sites that post-date pottery’s invention in the later Neolithic era (from c. 6400 BCE). Pottery especially comprises an important part of the field of Levantine archaeology. Pottery is sorted according to its technological properties, its form (morphology), its function, and its style and decoration, which are sometimes culturally indicative. Careful study of these characteristics has led to increasingly refined typologies (classification of types) of individual vessels, which allow for the understanding of a change in a pot’s appearance, use, or form over space and time. Indeed, one of pottery’s most exploited archaeological functions is chronological. A refined pottery typology can be used to create diagnostic groupings of pots, which are called assemblages or corpora. Assemblages help identify different human activities and, to some extent, different people within specific contexts. Mineral and chemical analyses, including petrography, X-ray fluorescence, and neutron activation analysis, among others, have aided in the sourcing of clays used in a variety of objects. The sourcing of clays contributes to the understanding of local, regional, and long-distance trade in raw clay and finished ceramics. Another emerging field in ceramics is mathematical-form analysis. These different approaches to the study of ceramics contribute invaluable information about everyday life.