Glossary Pottery and vessels
Handmade
Also called: hand-made
Made without a potter's wheel, by pinching, coiling, joining slabs or modelling the clay directly with the hands and simple tools.
In archaeology "handmade" is a technical description of how a pot was formed. It says nothing about quality: some of the finest Cypriot pottery is handmade, with walls a few millimetres thick. Handmade pots are recognised by uneven wall thickness, slight asymmetry and the traces of coils, slabs or fingers inside.
All Cypriot pottery was handmade until the start of the Late Bronze Age, and the island's potters kept making their best wares by hand long after the wheel arrived. Base Ring and White Slip, the two great Late Bronze Age exports, were handmade throughout, and several wares were made in handmade and wheelmade versions side by side.
Related terms
- Coil-building
Building the walls of a pot from rolls of clay laid one on another in rings or a spiral, then pressed together and smoothed.
- Wheelmade
Shaped on a rotating potter's wheel, either thrown from a lump of clay or built by hand and then finished on a turning device.
- Potter's wheel
A turntable on which a pot is shaped as it rotates; a slow wheel or tournette helps finish a pot, while a fast wheel can throw one from a lump of clay.