Types of Ware

Red Polished jug with concentric circles and line panels, Early Cypriot III to Middle Cypriot I, Alexis Drakopoulos Collection

A ware is a family of pots that share a clay, a surface finish and a way of decorating. This section describes the main Cypriot wares from the Neolithic to the Cypro-Archaic period, how archaeologists came to name them, and where each one sits in time.

Cypriot archaeologists sort pottery by ware first and by shape second. A ware is a class of vessels that look and feel alike because they were made the same way: similar clay, the same surface treatment, the same approach to decoration. Robert Merrillees, who set out the principles of the system in 1991, pointed out that nobody knows how the ancient potters named their own products, so the modern ware names are "titles of academic convenience" [1, p. 238]. Nearly all of them describe the surface: Red Polished, White Painted, Black Slip, Bichrome, Monochrome, White Slip. Base Ring is named after the ring foot that most of its jugs and bowls carry, though Merrillees stressed that the foot is only one of several features that together identify the ware [1, p. 238]. The Red Polished jug at the top of this page shows why the surface matters: the red slip, the burnish and the incised circles are what place it, long before anyone measures its shape.

How the system was built

The scheme is older than scientific archaeology on the island. Thomas Sandwith, British vice-consul at Larnaca, read a paper to the Society of Antiquaries in London in May 1871 that sorted pottery from tombs by colour, decoration and shape and separated the Bronze Age wares from the Iron Age ones [2, pp. 232-233]. John Myres and Max Ohnefalsch-Richter's catalogue of the Cyprus Museum (1899) listed the Bronze Age wares in nearly Sandwith's order, beginning with Red Polished and running through Black Slip, Base Ring and White Slip [2, p. 232]. Einar Gjerstad kept these names in his 1926 thesis, Studies on Prehistoric Cyprus, because "nothing is so meaningless and confusing as a continual changing of pottery names" [1, p. 237].

The Swedish Cyprus Expedition of 1927 to 1931, directed by Gjerstad, then gave Cypriot archaeology its periods, its terminology and its categories of description [3, p. xxix]. In its final volumes J. R. Stewart classified the Early Bronze Age pottery and Paul Åström the Middle and Late Bronze Age [4, p. 45; 1, p. 238]. Both worked mainly from tomb vessels: the Early and Middle Bronze Age typologies rest chiefly on the north-coast cemeteries of Lapithos and Bellapais-Vounous, and the Base Ring typology on tomb finds in 95 per cent of cases [4, p. 45; 5, p. 119]. Gjerstad classified the Iron Age himself in 1948 [3, p. xxix].

Why the names confuse

Three habits of the Swedish system trip up newcomers. The first is the Roman numerals. Stewart admitted that each Red Polished class contained several fabrics, but he arranged his corpus by shape and date, so Red Polished I, II and III follow Early Cypriot I, II and III rather than any measurable technical difference; the long-lived hemispherical knob-lug bowl ended up as Red Polished II although most examples are technically Red Polished III or IV [1, p. 239]. Black Slip II and III are technically the same as Black Slip IV and V and were separated only because the first pair comes from Middle Cypriot deposits and the second from Late Cypriot ones [1, p. 239]. Sarah Vaughan made the same complaint about Base Ring: the labels Proto, I and II imply a straight line of development that stratified settlement deposits do not support, and excavators regularly find Base Ring I shapes carrying the white paint supposed to mark Base Ring II [5, p. 119].

The second habit is the reuse of names. Gjerstad's Iron Age wares carry the same names as Middle and Late Cypriot ones (White Painted, Bichrome, Black Slip, Plain White) although the vessels are completely different [3, p. xxix]. He also numbered them on one scale in which the numeral stands for the period. White Painted and Bichrome run from I to VII; a ware that begins later takes its own number with the period number in brackets, so Black-on-Red runs from I (III) to V (VII) [3, p. xxix]. That is why a Cypro-Archaic jug with a strainer spout in the Cesnola Collection is catalogued as Black-on-Red II (IV) Ware [6, p. 92]. Stager and Saltz remarked that Gjerstad meant by "ware" above all the surface decoration of a vessel, and that archaeologists used to Near Eastern pottery found this concern with surface at the expense of form a shock [3, pp. xxix-xxx].

The third habit is names that preserve an old theory. Proto-White Painted was called "Cypriote Submycenaean" by H. B. Walters, and by Gjerstad in 1926, before Gjerstad renamed it in 1944 [7, p. 199]. Black-on-Red was long called "Cypro-Phoenician" because its origin was uncertain. Analysis has since shown that it was made on Cyprus from the late tenth century BC and exported to the Levant, and the old term is now regarded as misleading [8, p. 158]; the article on the origins of Black-on-Red ware follows that argument.

Regions and revisions

Later excavations in the south, east and west showed that before the Late Bronze Age regional variety was the norm, and new names such as Red Polished Mottled, Red Polished Punctured and Drab Polished Blue Core were coined for pottery that would not fit the north-coast scheme [4, p. 45]. At Kissonerga-Ammoudhia, the largest western cemetery assemblage, Drab Polished ware appears to be a local western tradition and starts well before the late Middle Bronze Age date first given to it [9]. Some teams, such as Cornell's at Alambra, abandoned the Swedish subdivisions while keeping the broad names [2, p. 233]. Merrillees's view was that the system can absorb new material provided the names describe visible features; he objected to "Apliki Ware" and "Episkopi Ware" because site names say nothing about the pottery [1, p. 238]. The entries below use the broad ware names and give numbered subclasses where they help with dating.

The main wares in order

Ware	Period	Approximate date	Notes
Combed	Late Neolithic	from c. 4500 BC	Combed wavy bands; upper levels of Khirokitia and Sotira-Teppes
Red-on-White	Late Neolithic to Chalcolithic	c. 4600 to 2500 BC	Red paint on a white ground; northern Neolithic sites, then Erimi
Red Polished Philia	Philia phase, start of Early Cypriot I	soon after 2500 BC	Stewart's Red Polished I (Philia)
Red Polished	Early Cypriot I to Middle Cypriot	c. 2500 to 1600 BC	Red slip, burnished, often incised with lime-filled lines
Drab Polished	Early and Middle Cypriot, west	debated	Western tradition, a precursor of Base Ring
White Painted (Bronze Age)	end of Early Cypriot III to Middle Cypriot III	c. 2000 to 1600 BC	Linear painted patterns over the whole surface
White Slip	Late Cypriot I to II	c. 1600 to early 12th century BC	Thick white slip, painted; the milk bowl
Base Ring	Late Cypriot I to II	c. 1600 to early 12th century BC	Thin, hard, dark and metallic; relief decoration
Proto-White Painted	Late Cypriot IIIB	11th century BC	Aegean shapes and motifs; parent of Iron Age White Painted
White Painted and Bichrome (Iron Age)	Cypro-Geometric I to Cypro-Classical	c. 1050 to 325 BC	Gjerstad's types I to VII; Bichrome adds red to black
Black-on-Red	Cypro-Geometric to Cypro-Classical	from the late 10th century BC	Gjerstad's I (III) to V (VII); formerly 'Cypro-Phoenician'

The dates follow Karageorghis's surveys for the Neolithic and Chalcolithic wares [10, pp. 27, 32, 39] and for the Bronze Age and early Iron Age ones [6, pp. 27, 33, 36, 39, 53, 78], Iacovou for the end of Proto-White Painted [7, p. 204], Stager and Saltz for Gjerstad's Iron Age scale [3, p. xxix] and Kotsonas for Black-on-Red [8, p. 158]. Each ware has its own entry: Combed, Red-on-White, Red Polished Philia, Red Polished, Drab Polished, White Painted, White Slip, Base Ring, Proto-White Painted, Bichrome and Black-on-Red. For the periods themselves see the chronology section.

The Drakopoulos collection has examples of several of these wares, among them a Neolithic Combed ware bowl fragment, a Middle Bronze Age White Painted III–IV juglet, a White Slip II milk bowl, a Base Ring II jug, a Cypro-Archaic Bichrome IV jug and an Iron Age Black-on-Red juglet. The Metropolitan Museum's Cypro-Archaic I kylix, 74.51.467, is a footed bowl of Bichrome IV Ware with a stylized lotus in a panel on each side, a type Karageorghis describes as typical of Cypro-Archaic I [6, p. 91].

Types

From the collection

and 73 more objects linked from these pages

References

1.Merrillees, R. S. (1991). The principles of Cypriot Bronze Age pottery classification. In J. A. Barlow, D. L. Bolger, & B. Kling (Eds.), Cypriot ceramics: Reading the prehistoric record (University Museum Monograph 74, pp. 237-240). The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania.
2.Merrillees, R. S. (2001). T. B. Sandwith and the beginnings of Cypriote archaeology. In V. Tatton-Brown (Ed.), Cyprus in the 19th century AD: Fact, fancy and fiction. Papers of the 22nd British Museum Classical Colloquium, December 1998 (pp. 222-238). Oxbow Books.
3.Stager, L. E., & Saltz, D. L. (1974). The Swedish Cyprus Expedition, 1927-1931. In L. E. Stager, A. Walker, & G. E. Wright (Eds.), American Expedition to Idalion, Cyprus: First preliminary report, seasons of 1971 and 1972 (pp. xxix-xxx). American Schools of Oriental Research.
4.Herscher, E. (1991). Beyond regionalism: Toward an islandwide Early and Middle Cypriot sequence. In J. A. Barlow, D. L. Bolger, & B. Kling (Eds.), Cypriot ceramics: Reading the prehistoric record (University Museum Monograph 74, p. 45). The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania.
5.Vaughan, S. J. (1991). Material and technical characterization of Base Ring ware: A new fabric typology. In J. A. Barlow, D. L. Bolger, & B. Kling (Eds.), Cypriot ceramics: Reading the prehistoric record (University Museum Monograph 74, pp. 119-120). The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania.
6.Karageorghis, V. (2000). Ancient art from Cyprus: The Cesnola Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
7.Iacovou, M. (1991). Proto-White Painted pottery: A classification of the ware. In J. A. Barlow, D. L. Bolger, & B. Kling (Eds.), Cypriot ceramics: Reading the prehistoric record (University Museum Monograph 74, pp. 199-205). The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania.
8.Kotsonas, A. (2012). 'Creto-Cypriot' and 'Cypro-Phoenician' complexities in the archaeology of interaction between Crete and Cyprus. In M. Iacovou (Ed.), Cyprus and the Aegean in the Early Iron Age: The legacy of Nicolas Coldstream (pp. 155-181). Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation.
9.Graham, L. (2013). The necropolis of Kissonerga-Ammoudhia: Techniques of ceramic production in Early-Middle Bronze Age western Cyprus [Doctoral dissertation, The University of Edinburgh].
10.Karageorghis, V. (1982). Cyprus: From the Stone Age to the Romans (Ancient Peoples and Places 101). Thames and Hudson.

Types of Ware

How the system was built

Why the names confuse

Regions and revisions

The main wares in order

Types

Combed Ware

Red-on-White Ware

Red Polished Philia Ware

Red Polished Ware

Drab Polished Ware

White Painted Ware

Base Ring Ware

White Slip Ware

Plain White Ware

Mycenaean Imports and Local Imitations

White Painted Wheelmade Ware

Proto-White Painted Ware

Bichrome Ware

Black-on-Red Ware

Bichrome Red Ware

From the collection

References