The late Hellenistic period, spanning the 2nd and early 1st centuries BC, was a time of great tumult and violence thanks to nearly incessant warfare. At the same time, the period saw the greatest expansion of Hellenistic Greek culture, including ceramics. Papers in this volume explore problems of ceramic chronology (often based on evidence dependent on the violent nature of the period), survey trends in both production and consumption of Hellenistic ceramics particularly in Asia Minor and the Pontic region, and assess the impact of Hellenistic ceramic culture across much of the eastern Mediterranean and into the Black Sea.

This volume emphasizes the complex interactions between ceramic containers and people in past and present contexts. Pottery, once it appears in the archaeological record, is one of the most routinely recovered artifacts. It is made frequently, broken often, and comes in endless varieties according to economic and social requirements. Moreover, even in shreds ceramics can last almost forever, providing important clues about past human behavior. The contributors to this volume, all leaders in ceramic research, probe the relationship between humans and ceramics. Here they offer new discoveries obtained through traditional lines of inquiry, demonstrate methodological breakthroughs, and expose innovative new areas for research. Among the topics covered in this volume are the age at which children begin learning pottery making; the origins of pottery in the Southwest U.S., Mesoamerica, and Greece; vessel production and standardization; vessel size and food consumption patterns; the relationship between pottery style and meaning; and the role pottery and other material culture plays in communication. Pottery and People provides a cross-section of the state of the art, emphasizing the complete interactions between ceramic containers and people in past and present contexts. This is a milestone volume useful to anyone interested in the connections between pots and people.

Color-packed volume brings to stunning life 1,000-year-old Native American ceramic pottery. 163 illustrations.

Noted archaeologist Polly Schaafsma presents new research by current scholars on this largely neglected ancestral Puebloan site.

This book makes recent scholarship on the Italic people of fourth-century BC Apulia available to English-speaking audiences.

Despite the centrality of ceramics to Mojave culture, Mojave pottery is virtually unknown today. Museums have mostly small, unrepresentative, and largely undocumented collections, and the works have received little attention from scholars and collectors.This comprehensive volume brings to light the wondrously inventive clay people, mythological creatures, and effigy vessels of the Mojave people, recording this Southwest Indian ceramic art in more than 50 full-color plates, 25 color and black-and-white illustrations, and a complete catalog of the Dillingham Collection of Mojave Ceramics, one of the largest and most complete Mojave assemblages in the world, at the Indian Arts Research Center of the School of American Research. Jill Leslie Furst takes an ethnohistorical approach here, drawing on written literature about the tribe that ranges from seventeenth-century Spanish documents to ethnographic accounts from the 1970s. The stories of the Mojaves-along with descriptions of family life, gender roles, subsistence activities, clothing and personal adornment, shamanism, and the afterlife-form the context for Furst's exploration of the Mojave ceramic tradition.

How the interactions of non-elites influenced Athenian material culture and society The seventh century BC in ancient Greece is referred to as the Orientalizing period because of the strong presence of Near Eastern elements in art and culture. Conventional narratives argue that goods and knowledge flowed from East to West through cosmopolitan elites. Rejecting this explanation, Athens at the Margins proposes a new narrative of the origins behind the style and its significance, investigating how material culture shaped the ways people and communities thought of themselves. Athens and the region of Attica belonged to an interconnected Mediterranean, in which people, goods, and ideas moved in unexpected directions. Network thinking provides a way to conceive of this mobility, which generated a style of pottery that was heterogeneous and dynamic. Although the elite had power, they were unable to agree on the norms of conspicuous consumption and status display. A range of social actors used objects, contributing to cultural change and to the socially mediated production of meaning. Historiography and the analysis of evidence from a wide range of contexts—cemeteries, sanctuaries, workshops, and symposia—offers the possibility to step outside the aesthetic frameworks imposed by classical Greek masterpieces and to expand the canon of Greek art. Highlighting the results of new excavations and looking at the interactions of people with material culture, Athens at the Margins provocatively shifts perspectives on Greek art and its relationship to the eastern Mediterranean.

In A Potter's Workbook, renowned studio potter and teacher Clary Illian presents a textbook for the hand and the mind. Her aim is to provide a way to see, to make, and to think about the forms of wheel-thrown vessels; her information and inspiration explain both the mechanics of throwing and finishing pots made simply on the wheel and the principles of truth and beauty arising from that traditional method. Each chapter begins with a series of exercises that introduce the principles of good form and good forming for pitchers, bowls, cylinders, lids, handles, and every other conceivable functional shape. Focusing on utilitarian pottery created on the wheel, Illian explores sound, lively, and economically produced pottery forms that combine an invitation to mindful appreciation with ease of use. Charles Metzger's striking photographs, taken under ideal studio conditions, perfectly complement her vigorous text.

The finest history of pottery available, this book offers an inspirational journey through one of the oldest and most widespread of human activities.

For decades archaeologists have used pottery to reconstruct the lifeways of ancient populations. It has become increasingly evident, however, that to make inferences about prehistoric economic, social, and political activities through the patterning of ceramic variation, it is necessary to determine the location where the vessels were made. Through detailed analysis of manufacturing technology and design styles as well as the use of modern analytical techniques such as neutron activation analysis, Zede–o here demonstrates a broadly applicable methodology for identifying local and nonlocal ceramics.