Crafts

Pottery

Also Known As Ceramics

Citation Formats

General Reference

Home, Crafts and Hobbies Atlas. "Pottery." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://home.interactiveatlas.org/crafts/pottery.

APA Style

Home, Crafts and Hobbies Atlas. (n.d.). Pottery. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://home.interactiveatlas.org/crafts/pottery

BibTeX

@misc{home,craftsandhobbiesatlas-pottery,
  author = {Home, Crafts and Hobbies Atlas},
  title = {Pottery},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://home.interactiveatlas.org/crafts/pottery},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Clay shaped by hand or wheel and made permanent by fire: the craft behind every bowl, jug and tile before industry, and behind the studio ceramics movement since. Pottery is humanity's oldest synthetic material, older than agriculture, and the potter's wheel, the kiln and the glaze are among the deepest tool traditions any craft carries.

Facts

Craft Class

Ceramic and Glass 1

Earliest Evidence (Circa)

Ceramic figurines circa 29,000 years before present (Dolni Vestonice); the oldest known pottery vessels circa 20,000 years before present (Xianren Cave, China) 1

Origin

The very earliest fired-clay objects were not containers at all: Gravettian figurines such as the Venus of Dolni Vestonice, fired roughly 27,000 years ago, predate the earliest known pottery vessels, found at Xianren Cave in China, by several thousand years. 1

Cross-Tradition Connections