Abstract
The sign value of the first potter's wheels used in the southern Levant (second half of the 5th mill. BC) is explored through the production modalities of V-shaped bowls, the main category of vessels shaped on the wheel at that time. To this end, a morphometric approach is applied to V-shaped bowls from four sites through numerical methods available in a Pottery 3-D software used to extract shape parameters. The results obtained highlight a high variability in absolute dimensions and a low variability in profiles. This apparent contradiction is discussed in light of the variability of bowls made under three experimental conditions. The baseline data obtained suggests that the roughouts of the archaeological bowls were made by several hands, while the shaping of the bowls on the wheel was done by a single hand. This disjunction in the production process supports the hypothesis that the earliest rotary instruments found in the southern Levant were loaded with symbolic meaning that was then transferred to the vessels when they were shaped on the wheel.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 103557 |
| Journal | Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports |
| Volume | 45 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2022 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2022 Elsevier Ltd
Funding
We are extremely grateful to Yael Abadi-Reiss, Daniel Varga, Matthew Adams, Shay Bar and Michael Freikman to have let us study the wheel-shaped bowls found during their excavations. Special thanks to the Computational Archaeology Laboratory at the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on the 3-D scans of the V-shaped bowls from the archaeological record; to the Computational Archaeology Laboratory at Tel-Aviv University on the 3-D scans of the experimental data; to Gadi Herzlinger for the statistical consultations, and to Omer Ze'evi-Berger for producing the maps. We are grateful to the Experimental Archaeology Unit at the Institute of Archaeology of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and to the students who kindly participated in Experiment #1; to the students in the “Experimental Archaeology” course, led by Yossi Zeidner for their participation in Experiment #2; and to the students in the Department of Ceramics and Glass Design at Bezalel Academy who participated in Experiment #3. We thank the professional potters, Ora Mazar and Dafna Zuckerman for their contribution to this research project. Finally, we would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this article for their very insightful and constructive comments which greatly improved its quality.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
Keywords
- 3-D Morphometric Analysis
- Late Chalcolithic
- Potter's wheel
- Sign-value objects
- Southern Levant
- Wheel-shaped bowls