Combed Ware Bowl Fragment with Multiple Wavy Bands

Late Neolithic (Sotira culture), c. 4500–3900 BCE · Combed Ware · Handmade

A trapezoidal body sherd with a sloping upper break, its decorated face covered in a deep, slightly glossy red slip. Across the centre runs a single group of six or seven pale orange-buff lines, each rippling in close waves and all moving in step, as if pulled together by one pass of a many-toothed comb. The lines run across the sherd from the upper break to the lower edge. To the right the red slip is left plain, an uncombed interval between groups, and a fainter line at the left edge may belong to a neighbouring group.

The slip is worn and pitted, with white lime specks over its surface. The other face is heavily abraded and lime-flecked, the red surviving in patches, with only faint traces of banding at one side.

Commentary

This is the finest of the combed sherds in the collection and shows Combed Ware at its most characteristic. The ware was made in the Late Neolithic Sotira culture of southern Cyprus: the potter coated the vessel in a thick red slip and, while it was wet, drew a comb-like tool of shell, bone or reed through it, so that the teeth exposed the light body in reserved bands; the surface was then polished [1]. The pale lines here are the clay body showing through, and the red is the ground, which distinguishes the piece from the painted "ripple" Red-on-White of northern sites, where multiple wavy lines were brushed on positively over a white slip [3].

Dikaios sorted the combed patterns from single broad bands through groups of straight bands to multiple wavy bands, which he regarded as the technical culmination of the style [1]. The evenness of these waves, each line keeping its distance from its neighbours through every crest, suggests a single multi-toothed tool drawn through the slip in one steady movement. At Sotira such fine wavy combing is most frequent in the latest phase, Phase III, but the settlement seems to have been short-lived and a single sherd cannot be placed within it [1]. The groups of wavy bands on complete vessels usually hang from the rim, as on the spouted hemispherical bowl 96a from Sotira, combed with multiple wavy bands inside and out [1].

The shape is less secure than on the other combed sherds in the collection. Combed Ware jugs were decorated on the outside only, while bowls were combed on both faces [1]. The worn reverse of this fragment keeps faint traces that are consistent with combing, which would place it in a bowl, but the decoration there is too abraded to confirm.

The nearest museum parallel is a Sotira sherd in the Medelhavsmuseet, Stockholm, with close vertical wavy bands on a red ground, which the museum received from Dikaios in the 1950s [5]. Two further Sotira sherds with wavy combing are in the Ashmolean [6], and the Khirokitia report illustrates sherds with fine vertical wavy bands from the ceramic re-occupation of that site [2].

Combed Ware develops in the south after c. 4350 BCE on radiocarbon evidence, later than the first Dark Faced Burnished and Red-on-White pottery of the island [3], and it disappears with the start of the Chalcolithic apart from a vestigial presence in the earliest Erimi and Kalavasos levels [4]. The collector's label with the group reads "c. 3500 BC", the uncalibrated date of its time; the calibrated range is about a thousand years earlier. The find-spot is unrecorded, and a south-coast settlement is only the likeliest source.