The Story of an Innovation: Learning the Potter's Wheel in the Third-Millennium Aegean

Maria Choleva of the University of Athens examines the introduction and transmission of the potter's wheel in the Aegean during the second half of the third millennium BC. Delivered in Greek, the lecture opens with the shift in ceramic studies from processual models of technology toward the French anthropology of technology and the chaîne opératoire. Drawing on Valentine Roux's work in the prehistoric Levant, Choleva explains that the earliest wheel-made vessels were formed by combining coil-building with rotational kinetic energy on tournettes.

Turning to the Aegean in late Early Bronze II and Early Bronze III, Choleva presents macroscopic, petrographic, chemical and X-ray radiographic analyses of assemblages from mainland Greece, Euboea and the eastern Aegean. In late Early Bronze II, the wheel is used exclusively for a small range of Anatolian-derived tableware shapes of the Lefkandi I-Kastri group, while local wares remain handmade. In central Greece, local wheel-fashioning is attested mainly at Lefkandi, from which a few vessels reached sites such as Pefkakia. In Early Bronze III, wheel use spreads across central Greece and into the northeastern Peloponnese, restricted to specific drinking vessels in Grey Burnished and light-coloured wares produced alongside handmade examples of the same shapes.

Using Roux's three wheel-coiling methods, which apply rotational energy at successively earlier stages of coil-building, Choleva traces how communities of practice learned the craft. Whereas Early Bronze II production at Lefkandi is dominated by the demanding Method 3, Early Bronze III settlements such as Lefkandi, Pefkakia and Tiryns show varying combinations of Methods 1, 2 and 3. Choleva argues that because consumers valued the vessels' metallic appearance regardless of forming technique, wheel-coiling persisted for centuries as an embodied craft practice that defined the identity of small groups of potters.