Pots and People: Ceramic Containers and Craftsmen between the Mediterranean and Central Asia
Examining contexts of deposition and approaching ceramic materials associated with painters’ activities in the eastern Mediterranean, the great empires in the Near East and Central Asia, as well as the legacy of the potter’s and painter’s craft at sites, the project aims to reconstruct aspects of the chaîne opératoire involving two of the most traditional craft-techniques in these cultures during the 1st millennium BCE. Traditionally, modern scholars have used ceramics to establish a chronology to identify possible dates for structures in the Mesopotamian and Achaemenid Persian heartlands by the Zagros mountains, Central Asia, and sites in the eastern Mediterranean. This project will look at aspects of the creation and function of ceramic containers and ask what the evidence tells us about the relationship between those involved in creating the pots and those preparing paint materials for the decoration of reliefs and sculpture. What can we learn, when we attempt to disentangle aspects of craftsmen’s activities, about these craftsmen’s movements from investigating ceramic assemblages with paint residues in context? How can linguistic evidence help us to understand the concepts, words, and meanings associated with ceramic containers and craftsmanship? Approaching paint pots by balancing between material science studies, anthropology and other contemporary disciplines, I will address aspects of the entanglement of materiality, human activities and the life of craftsmen on construction sites, such as Susa, Persepolis and Nisa, and selected sites in Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean. Within this documentary project, I will also revisit modern approaches to categorizing types and aspects of historiography in research on ceramic materials between Central Asia and the Mediterranean Sea.