Tag: Archaeological Institute of America

Making Greek Pottery

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

… no, not poetry, like I originally typed.  Interesting project at the University of Arizona:

On a sunny morning on the University of Arizona campus, art student Steve Carcello, dressed in a clay-spattered T-shirt and sunglasses, steps up to what might look to the casual passerby like a round wooden table. In moments, the “tabletop” becomes a spinning blur, propelled by Carcello’s clay-coated hands.

Slowly, a pot begins to take shape in the middle. As the form grows, a fellow UA student stands alongside the wheel, taking measurements with a handheld tachometer, recording the wheel’s number of revolutions per minute.

The students are engaged in hands-on research exploring how ancient Greek pottery was created, using a replica of an ancient hand-operated wheel.

With no known ancient Greek potter’s wheels surviving from that era – just artists’ depictions of what the wheels looked like – Carcello, a Master of Fine Arts student, made his own wheel, constructed from spruce and oak.

Unlike modern electric pottery wheels, which are equipped with foot pedals to make them spin, Carcello’s wheel is operated entirely by hand. As suggested by Greek artists’ renderings from about 600 B.C. to 450 B.C., potters would turn the wheel by hand themselves or with the help of an apprentice.

Carcello built the wheel last semester as his research project for a Greek pottery class taught by Eleni Hasaki, UA associate professor of anthropology and classics.

“It was an unexpected success,” Carcello said.

Now, under Hasaki’s guidance, Carcello is part of an interdisciplinary research project exploring the art and technology of ancient Greek pottery.

While Carcello recreates Greek vessels on the wheel, Dan Pont, a senior majoring in biology and minoring in classics, focuses on the math and science behind the wheel, measuring how many revolutions per minute of the potter’s wheel are required to create pieces of different sizes. With the help of Mike Jacobs, archaeological collections curator at the Arizona State Museum, Pont has also measured the weights of several ancient Greek pots to examine the correlation of pot size and required speed of the wheel.

Meanwhile, Katherine Bare, a freshman honor’s student majoring in linguistics, has been studying ancient Greek drinking vessels as part of an honor’s project, creating her own replicas in the School of Art’s ceramics studio with assistance from Aurore Chabot, UA professor of ceramic art.

Together, the students are gaining insight into how ancient Greek potters achieved what they did.

“Through hands-on experience, they get an understanding of the techniques and challenges ancient Greek potters faced, and how these tools and these pots were used in society,” said Hasaki, a native of Greece.

Much of the students’ work is done at the in the School of Anthropology’s Laboratory of Traditional Technology, an experimental archaeology lab, founded in 1983 by Michael Schiffer, Fred A. Riecker Distinguished Professor of Anthropology. Hasaki and anthropology professor Dave Killick are in line to take over the lab next year following Schiffer’s retirement. A potter himself, Schiffer recently successfully formed several pots on the replica wheel.

“The students are using replicas to emulate what was being done 2,500 years ago,” Hasaki said.

In addition to the hand-operated potter’s wheel replica, the UA also owns and maintains replica of an ancient Greek kiln, housed at St. Augustine High School in Tucson. Funded by the Archaeological Institute of America, the kiln has been fired 10 times since its completion in 2004, and Hasaki hopes to use the kiln to fire some of the pieces created on the replica potter’s wheel.

She says: “We’re slowly recreating an entire potters’ workshop.”

Greek Kiln Firing

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

I don’t think we’ve mentioned this in the past … from the Tucson Sentinel:

Flames will fill an 8-foot-tall ancient Greek kiln replica when students, teachers and community members attend the all-day 10th Greek Kiln Firing on Friday.

The event began in 2004 when the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) awarded the AIA Society of Tucson and Southern Arizona — made up of University of Arizona faculty and students — the first Local Society Outreach Grant for its newly established Greek Kiln Project.

The AIA awards a university or program that successfully plans and implements an outreach program in the society to get the community involved and to educate the community in some way about archaeology.

Eleni Hasaki, an associate professor at UA’s School of Anthropology and Classics, helped conceive and submit the Kiln Project along with members of the society, St. Augustine Catholic High school and local potters.

“My research expertise is in ancient Greek pyrotechnology, so it was an exciting and intriguing project for me to start. All the AIA lectures take place on campus, so there is a close connection between the AIA Tucson Society and UA,” said Hasaki.

“In the late ’90s and around early 2000s there was a big push to do experimental replicas and to test theories that only come from archeological remains. To replicate it, build it and fire it and then study the whole process they used,” she said.

The construction of the wood-fired kiln was complex. The Greek kiln has two chambers — a combustion chamber with a perforated floor and another that holds the pots.

St. Augustine Catholic High School offered their campus as a holding place for the Greek kiln.

“We were extremely lucky when the school allowed us and welcomed us to make the project a part of their school, the location is an educational experiment in an educational setting so it worked out perfectly,” said Hasaki.

“It had to be in an open area, and it took a while to come up with a design of the kiln because it had to consist of materials as close to antiquity as possible, we wanted to come up with a design based on archeological evidence,” she said.

Students and faculty contribute to the event each year by bringing some of their own pieces to be fired. Black- and red-figured pottery is most commonly fired at the event to represent the ancient Greek techniques.

St. Augustine teacher Patricia Bradshaw and her students have been producing different types of pottery with historical and mythological themes including the Trojan wars, Olympian gods, theatrical masks and Roman gladiators.

Unlike a gas or electric kiln, the wood-fired process takes 18 hours and the kiln’s temperatures can climb as high as 1,600 degrees.

The firing event attracts local potters because the effects of the wood-fired kiln on the glazes are unpredictable and less controlled, Hasaki said.

“People come and go to the firing, it reaches out to a lot of academic audiences. There is a team coming from the ASU Arts Program and we even have ceramic pieces sent to us from a potter in Japan to be fired,” she said. […]

… the article ends with an exhortation to visit the AIA Society of Tucson and Southern Arizona’s web page … the Kiln Project’s section is definitely worth a look in this context.