Glossary Pottery and vessels
Coil-building
Also called: coiling, coil-built
Building the walls of a pot from rolls of clay laid one on another in rings or a spiral, then pressed together and smoothed.
Coiling needs no equipment beyond a flat surface, and it can produce vessels of almost any size. The joins are usually smoothed away, but they may survive as faint horizontal seams, uneven wall thickness or breaks that follow the line of a coil.
Before the potter's wheel reached Cyprus around 1650 BCE, Cypriot pottery was built by hand, and early White Painted vessels were coil-built. Coiling continued long after: large Late Bronze and Early Iron Age jugs and amphorae show coil seams, and study of the earliest Plain White pottery called "wheelmade" found coils shaped on a turning device.
Related terms
- Handmade
Made without a potter's wheel, by pinching, coiling, joining slabs or modelling the clay directly with the hands and simple tools.
- Wheelmade
Shaped on a rotating potter's wheel, either thrown from a lump of clay or built by hand and then finished on a turning device.
- Potter's wheel
A turntable on which a pot is shaped as it rotates; a slow wheel or tournette helps finish a pot, while a fast wheel can throw one from a lump of clay.