« 3.3-Million-year-old Child Found!
Main
Playing Legal with Torture »
September 22, 2006
Friday Pot Blogging
Today's pot is a "straight sided" bowl. It is rather typical of a class of bowls from the North of Israel that were made and used in the Iron IIC Age.
Depending on whom you ask the Iron IIC Age starts around 722 BCE. Some would start the period a little earlier. Just about everyone thinks the period ends with the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. This bowl is from the same period as the open mouth jars I featured a couple of weeks ago.
Amiran, 200, pictures a similar, if somewhat shallower, bowl from Hazor and illustrates (203) three others also from Hazor. One of those illustrated (203, plate 64, #7) looks very much like the example from the study collection.
The inside of the bowl was smoothed, "burnished" as they say in pot talk. Aside from making the inside of the bowl smooth, burnishing also increases its water tightness. The outside still shows the wheel marks left by the potter's fingers. This bowl, like all bowls of this type has a flat bottom.
Take a look inside the bowl on the right, just below the rim. You will see a crack and some grayish discoloration. When this bowl came into the antiquities market in Israel some time in the early 1970s it was broken. There was a large sherd, including a portion of the rim, which was detached from the rest of the bowl. Someone glued the sherd back in place and used some kind of clay, the source of the discoloration, to try to conceal the break. On the left, you can see a chip in the rim and some further discoloration. I am not sure when the bowl was chipped in this location. However, I'm fairly sure that it was chipped before it came into the hands of whoever repaired the break on the right. The reason I think this is that when I cleaned the bowl, the clay that was used to repair the chip dissolved with surprising little water. There was no sign that a small sherd from the bowl was used in this failed repair.
This is the only bowl in the study collection that is currently in use. It normally holds a couple of ancient flint sickle blades, a chunk of the wall of an ancient oven and a small metal weight. I'll share them with my abnormal readers sometime. Oh, I just realized, two oil dipper juglets are on the mantel with artificial flowers in them. So I guess they are in current use also. Perhaps they will be the subject of next weeks Pot Blogging post.
Reference:
Posted by DuaneSmith at September 22, 2006 07:25 PM | Read more on Archaeology |
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://WWW.telecomtally.com/cgi-bin/blog/mt-tb.cgi/850
Comments
Post a comment
Please read Abnormal Interest's Comments Policy.