The pots were favored for water transportation and storage, grain storage along with cooking pots and storage for oil, beer, milk, and curd. After finding suitable soil they built their temporary kilns and produced and sold their wares before moving on to the next village. Usually this was a family enterprise, some of the pottery being created on wheels and some were handmade. Due to the problems of transportation in the early days the potters came to the villages and set up shop on the outskirts. Since most pottery was probably made by women, young girls would undoubtedly have done their best to emulate accurately their mothers’ lessons on the correct way to make a pot.The origin of Indian pottery goes back to the Indus Valley civilization. An unusual aspect of Georgia pottery production is that the Indians evidently did not use it as a means of expressing themselves. Most cooking pots were about twelve inches high and the same distance across.Īrchaeologists find that pottery is one of the most sensitive indicators of time, and they have used it to construct most of the chronologies for the last 4,500 years in Georgia prehistory and early history. The forms of vessels ranged from simple straight-sided pots with rounded bases to large excurvate rim jars to rounded incurving bowls. Some vessels had their outsides “decorated” with paddles wrapped in small or large string or a simple burlaplike fabric. Red and sometimes black or white paint was also used to decorate vessels. Some of these designs were quite elaborate. Another important decoration method included designs incised or drawn in the wet clay with tools of wood or bone. This style of decoration was rare in the native ceramics of most parts of the world, but it was an important tradition in Georgia Indian ceramics for almost 2,500 years. Makers imparted the designs to the vessel surface by striking the soft, wet vessels with the carved paddles.
The first and perhaps most important decorative technique used by Georgia Indians was the use of wooden paddle stamps with different designs carved on their surfaces.
Other tempering agents used by Georgia Indians included crushed or ground shell and crushed limestone.Īlthough many pottery vessels were simple undecorated cooking vessels, others were decorated using a variety of techniques. A pot made of pure clay will often explode in the firing process when moisture escapes as steam. Tempering simply allows the paste of a newly formed pot to dry adequately before firing. Most Indian pottery from Georgia was made of paste that was tempered with common sand. This early pottery dates to perhaps 4,500 years ago. The earliest pottery in Georgia-and in the United States-is fiber-tempered, so called because it was made of a paste formed by mixing, or tempering, Spanish moss with clay. Because many of these names are redundant or obsolete, however, perhaps 100 types now account for all normal varieties of pottery from Georgia’s prehistory.Įven though all Indian pottery is open-fired earthenware made at a low temperature, there were many variations of the paste formula. To date, more than 400 named types have been used by archaeologists to describe the Indian pottery of Georgia. Despite general similarities in Georgia Indian pottery through time, many differences have been noted. American archaeologists call these pottery pieces sherds (not shards) and have been studying them for well over 100 years. Next to stone tools and stone debris, pieces of pottery vessels are the most common evidence of the former Indian occupation of Georgia.
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