Glossary Pottery and vessels
Wheelmade
Also called: wheel-made
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.
The wheel reached Cyprus around 1650 BCE, at the start of the Late Bronze Age, much later than in the neighbouring mainland. At first it was used for only a few wares, among them Plain White, Bichrome and Red and Black Slip, and handmade and wheelmade versions of the same shapes were made alongside each other for about four centuries.
Cypriot potters took up the wheel wholesale only at the end of the 13th and in the 12th century BCE, with Aegean-style wares such as White Painted Wheelmade III. The older catalogue label "wheelmade" is broad, and close study has shown that some pots so described were coil-built and shaped on a slow wheel.
Related terms
- 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.
- Handmade
Made without a potter's wheel, by pinching, coiling, joining slabs or modelling the clay directly with the hands and simple tools.
- Coil-building
Building the walls of a pot from rolls of clay laid one on another in rings or a spiral, then pressed together and smoothed.
Where it appears
- Plain White Ware
- White Painted Wheelmade Ware
- From Bronze to Iron: Cypriot Pottery c. 1300–950 BCE
- Mycenaean Imports and Local Imitations
- Proto-White Painted Ware
- Bowls
- Late Bronze Age Cyprus
- The Pottery of Ancient Cyprus
- White Painted Ware
- Bichrome Ware
- Middle Bronze Age Cyprus
- Ugarit and the Levant
and 24 more compendium pages