pottery

pottery

1. articles, vessels, etc., made from earthenware and dried and baked in a kiln

2. a place where such articles are made

3. the craft or business of making such articles
www.potterymaking.org/pmionline.html
www.ceramicstoday.com
www.studiopottery.com

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

pottery

[′päd·ə·rē]

(materials)

Objects made of clay which may be nonvitreous, porous, opaque, and glazed or unglazed; also included is earthenware such as stoneware.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

pottery

1. Any fired clayware which is produced by a clay worker.

2. The low-fired, porous, colored body ware, in contrast to white or buff-colored earthenware.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Architecture and Construction. Copyright © 2003 by McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Pottery

 

the production of dishes, toys, lamps, brick, roofing tile, tile, and other objects from fired clay. The words goncharstvo(pottery), gonchar(gor”nchar; potter), and gorshok (gornets; pot) are derived from the Russian word gorn(kiln).

Discovered during the early Neolithic, pottery greatly enhanced man’s chances in the struggle for survival by making it possible to cook his food. In this sense pottery may be ranked with such great inventions as the use of fire, and according to the classification of Morgan and Engels, marks the transition from the wild to the barbaric stage. By the 15th through 17th centuries, an overwhelming majority of the world’s settled peoples had mastered the craft of pottery. Inhabitants of regions devoid of pottery clay (Polynesia), many nomadic tribes of Central and Middle Asia, and also Australians, Bushmen, inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, and some hunting tribes of Southeast Asia, northwestern America, and California, whose production forces were at a low level of development, were an exception.

Primitive pottery was a domestic production (in some tribes practiced mainly by women). Probably the earliest methods of preparing of vessels were to smear clay on the inside of woven baskets (which burned away when fired) or to “scratch out” bowls from whole lumps of clay. Other primitive ways to make vessels were to hollow out a lump of clay by placing it on a block and pounding it with a mallet, to model them from flat pieces of clay, and to build the walls with rows of clay coils or with spiral coils. The last two methods were dominant during transition to the craft method when potters began using a potter’s wheel and later a pottery kiln (formerly the articles were fired in an open fire or baked in the house oven). Professional potters appeared at different times among various peoples, but always at the stage of dissolution of the primitive communal societies and the rise of a class society (first in ancient Sumeria at the end of 4000 B.C.). The assortment and shapes of pottery wares reflect the characteristics of the everyday life and culture of peoples. The decoration of articles by painting, embossed ornaments, varnishing, and glazing is an important branch of folk art.

REFERENCES

Voevodskii, M. V. “K izucheniu goncharnoi tekhniki pervobytno-kommunisticheskogo obshchestva . . . .” Sovetskaia arkheo-logiia, 1936, no. 1.
Lips, I. Proiskhozhdenie veshchei. Moscow, 1954. (Translated from German.)

M. G. RABINOVICH

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.