Happy Thought for 30 August 2024

Have a Happy Thought:

 Clay is… amazing. Humans have been making things out of clay for at least 30,000 years. And it’s super useful – it lets us boil water and other substances, carry and store drinks and food.

 And also lets us make art.

 Sometimes, the art is painted on the pottery, like classic red-figure pottery of ancient Greece:

The wedding of Thetis, pyxis by the Wedding Painter, circa 470/460 BCE. Paris: Louvre. Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen 

 

Sometimes whole peoples and historic migrations are named after the type of pottery, because that is the most consistent, or hard-wearing and long-lasting, evidence of their culture.

Remnants of Lapita pottery, dated 1000 BCE. Image: University of Auckland, Department of Anthropology, Anthropology Photographic Archive

 

 

Sometimes the way the pottery is made in itself is the art, like this example of the coil and scrape method:

Mogollon (US Southwest) Brownware, Corrugated miniature ceramic bowl. Image: Tuzigoot National Monument Visitor Center

 

OF course, not all pottery is a container, clay can be made into all sorts of shapes. But because of how plastic – or malleable – clay is, the marks of the maker remain. Like on these Bison Sculptures, made more than 13,500 years ago in a cave in France, where we can still see finger-marks made by the sculptor, including where they used a fingernail to trace the jawlines!

The Tuc d'Audoubert Bison Reliefs (c.13,500 BCE). Image: http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/prehistoric/tuc-daudoubert-cave.htm#bison

 

So we’ve shown that pottery can be beautiful to 4 of the 5 senses: sight, touch, taste (the food and drink), smell (the food and drink). But did you know it can also be heard? (You’ll have to judge whether this is beautiful or not, but it is definitely very cool!)

 

A Belgian radio station in 2005 pulled what is simultaneously a great April-Fool’s-Day prank, and a foray into the field of archaeoacoustics. The radio station said that they had found this clay pot that had the recording of a violin embedded into the grooves of the pot, which could then be ‘read’ by a laser, similar to how DVDs and CDs are read, or how vinyl records are read by a needle. Here’s the audio link if you want to listen to it for yourself!