Glossary Pottery and vessels
Potter's wheel
Also called: tournette, slow wheel, fast 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.
Specialists distinguish two kinds of rotating device. A tournette, or slow wheel, is turned by hand and is used to even out and finish a pot built by other means. A fast wheel spins with enough momentum for the potter to raise the walls from a single lump of clay, which is called throwing.
Cyprus adopted the wheel late, around 1650 BCE, and has no evidence for any rotating device before that. Even after its arrival, some bowls published as wheelmade at Enkomi and Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios appear to have been shaped on a tournette, and the island's finest Late Bronze Age wares stayed handmade.
Full entry: Pottery Kilns and Firing in Ancient Cyprus
Related terms
- 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.
- Handmade
Made without a potter's wheel, by pinching, coiling, joining slabs or modelling the clay directly with the hands and simple tools.
- 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.
Where it appears
- Jars (Amphora)
- Middle Bronze Age Cyprus
- Bichrome Ware
- Bottles
- The Pottery of Ancient Cyprus
- Base Ring Ware
- Flasks
- Tools and Technologies of Ancient Cyprus
- White Painted Wheelmade Ware
- Base Ring Figurines (Astarte Type)
- Black-on-Red Ware
- Circles
and 9 more compendium pages