Then the word of the LORD came to me: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does?” declares the LORD. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.”
Jeremiah 18:5-6
When visiting ancient sites, pottery pieces can be found all over the place. With its abundance, understanding it yields a greater understanding of the past. How can these little broken pieces of fired clay help us so much? Why are they so important?
As you pick up one of these ancient relics, the first thought is the awe of handling something so old. The next realization is that it was someone’s trash – their jar or bowl dropped to the floor and broke. Imagine your coffee mug dropping to the floor and shattering into a 100 pieces. Not being worth keeping anymore, you throw it out and 3000 years later some later civilization is looking at a piece of it. Who was this person who owned this cup? What was it used for? What was the owner’s family like?
Pottery was owned by everyone, whether rich or poor. It was cheap. This guarantees our ability to find it everywhere. It also doesn’t decay. It broke thousands of years ago, was buried, and has sat quietly in place until someone digs it up. It has a short shelf life of just a few decades, so people had to keep buying more of it. Lastly, its styles change over time. Just as styles change for us today, the same applies to pottery. Because of these changes, someone with training in recognizing pottery can easily date it, matching it with other locations. This correlates the dating of different sites, but does give a precise date.
How does one get an accurate date of a potsherd? When you find a piece of pottery that you can date definitively (like finding it in a tomb of which we know when the person was buried), then you have established an absolute date. This establishes a date of all similar pottery across scores of sites. More than that, a given site contains relative dating: the newest artifacts are usually on top while the oldest are usually on the bottom. By establishing an absolute date of one layer, this gives a better impression of all the layers around it.
This is what makes pottery so useful to us and so fascinating.
