pottery

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Earthenware - green bodies on the drying shelf in the Conner Prairie Museum
Stoneware before the fire

As pottery , a technique is today for the production of ceramic mentioned in the articles of clay / clay formed, were dried, and fired decorated be hard and partially impermeable to water so that the final products. The root word pot shows that this technique for the production of bodies of revolution was used as opposed to today originally exclusively for the production of pot-shaped pottery.

meaning

A person who makes pottery products is called a potter and the place where the potter works is called a pottery . In the past, stove fitters were also referred to as potters in northern Germany , as they still made the pot- or cup-shaped stove tiles themselves. An earlier job title that is still used in Bavaria today is Hafner (from "port", container), which also meant the profession of furnace maker . The term “disk pot” was later used to differentiate it.

Since 2009, the correct occupational title of the chambers of crafts and guilds has no longer been potters (apprenticeship from 1938 to 1984) or ceramists specializing in “potters” or disk potters, but exclusively ceramists , since in addition to handcrafted disk pottery , industrial production methods such as casting or Pressing technique are taught. Depending on the training company, ceramists now produce utility ceramics, building ceramics such as stove tiles (partly turned on the disc) or tiles and / or decorative ceramics. Your tasks range from planning and design to manufacturing and selling the products. The term ceramist is preferred for people with artistic demands.

Molding techniques

In the bead technique , nowadays mainly used for large storage vessels over 15 liters, thick or thin strands of clay are layered in a ring or in spirals. When shaping medium-sized and small objects with the potter's wheel , a lump of clay set in rapid rotation is pulled out with the hands or with templates to form a rotationally symmetrical vessel. After shaping, the pre-dried workpieces are burned and thereby hardened. Temperatures of 450 ° C to over 1280 ° C are required for this. At temperatures below 1000 ° C, the pottery remains permeable to water ( terracotta ), above which it begins to glaze. Only certain clays can be burned so high that they glaze; these are especially clinker clay, stoneware clay and kaolin . In order to make porous clay pots impermeable to water and also for aesthetic reasons, low-fired clay pots are often covered with a glaze .

Potter at the potter's wheel

In the more modern wheel pottery, the clay is formed on a potter's wheel or knurled wheel. Pottery wheels are operated mechanically or electrically, knurling wheels manually. Disk pottery consists of three basic steps:

  1. Preparing and shaping the clay on the potter's wheel. The clay is kneaded and placed on the potter's wheel. The potter shapes the clay with his hands, using water as a lubricant. So-called rotating rails are used for fine-tuning. This is followed by 2–3 days of drying.
  2. The turning. The clay is placed on the potter's wheel again and processed with so-called twisting loops. You can z. B. make the floor more prominent and the walls thinner. Twisting is followed by drying again, this time for about 5-6 days.
  3. The glazing. The pottery is coated with a glaze, dried for 10-12 hours and then burned for 11 hours at approx. 1280 ° C.

In cast ceramics, the clay is poured into a mold, which is then air-dried. So you can mass produce exactly the same products. The forms are in two parts and mostly consist of plaster of paris.

Today clay vessels, especially tableware, are mainly manufactured industrially. In western cultures, artisanal pottery is more often used for artistic purposes, to maintain tradition or as a hobby . In the pottery areas z. B. the Westerwald (Kannenbäckerland), Upper Lusatia, Alsace, etc., however, there are still many potteries where the craft is traditionally practiced and maintained.

The sale of pottery and other handicrafts, on the other hand, serves as an important source of income for indigenous peoples . In the less developed countries, where electricity is not available in sufficient quantities and cheaply, pottery still plays an important role in the storage of food.

history

Firing clay jugs in East Timor the traditional way

The earliest European ceramic finds - fired clay figures - come from the Upper Paleolithic . According to popular belief, they were observed as a coincidental product near a campfire on clay or clay soil. The first ceramic figures are over 24,000 years old.

The oldest known ceramic vessels come from the Xianrendong cave in the People's Republic of China ; they arose approximately 20,000 to 19,000 ( cal BP ). The oldest evidence of a special use of ceramic vessels was dated to the beginning of the Jōmon period in Japan , based on vessels that are 15,000 to 11,800 years (cal BP) old and the hunters and gatherers of that time for cooking marine and freshwater animals served. Since the 6th millennium BC The slow turning potter's wheel was used in the Middle East. Painted pottery has been known in Mesopotamia since the Neolithic Hassuna period . Polychrome surface painted ceramic ( non-ferrous ceramic ) indicates the Eneolithic Halaf period . With the invention of the high-speed potter's wheel around 4000 BC. In Mesopotamia, mass production began.

Glazed ceramics have been around since the 3rd millennium BC. Known from Mesopotamia and Egypt.

The earliest ceramics in Africa are the 12,000 year old finds from Ounjougou in Mali in Africa. In America, pottery is around 3900 BC. In Oceania around 1600 BC. BC ( Lapita culture ). Some cultures of prehistory are named after their ceramic products, e.g. B. the band ceramic culture or the bell beaker culture .

Reconstruction of a pottery workshop, Museum of Traditional Crafts and Applied Arts, Troyan , Bulgaria

In the Middle Ages , pottery was one of the "dishonest" professions . There were pottery centers in the Rhineland, for example, where different forms of Rhenish pottery were produced.

Industrial manufacturing

At the present time, earthenware is mainly produced industrially . The artisanal pottery is operated as a handicraft. Not only utility ceramics, but also ceramic sculptures , reliefs and ceramic jewelry are offered in different techniques such as majolica , fine stoneware, raku ceramics and smoke-fired ceramics . Modern ceramic production has also made a name for itself with high-quality ceramic work in the visual arts .

Patron saint

The saints Radegundis , Simon Petrus and Goar are the patrons of the potters .

Web links

Commons : Pottery  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Friedrich Kluge (ed.): Etymological dictionary of the German language , 21st edition. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1975, ISBN 3110057093 . P. 281
  2. ↑ Pottery . At friesenring.de, accessed on August 31, 2016
  3. ↑ A bowl tile from Miltenberg . From furnologia.de, accessed on August 31, 2016
  4. ↑ Ceramist apprenticeship until 2008, Federal Employment Agency appointed ( Memento of the original from April 17, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / berufenet.arbeitsagentur.de
  5. ↑ Ceramist apprenticeship since 2009, Federal Employment Agency appointed ( Memento of the original from April 17, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / berufenet.arbeitsagentur.de
  6. ↑ Profile of a ceramicist ( memento of the original from April 17, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / berufenet.arbeitsagentur.de
  7. ↑ Ceramics - everyday object and high-tech material (archive version) ( Memento from June 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ Xiaohong Wu et al .: Early Pottery at 20,000 Years ago in Xianrendong Cave, China. In: Science . Volume 336, No. 6089, 2012, pp. 1696-1700, doi: 10.1126 / science.1218643
  9. ↑ Oliver E. Craig et al .: Earliest evidence for the use of pottery. In: Nature . Volume 496, No. 7445, 2013, pp. 351-354, doi: 10.1038 / nature12109