Some Reflections on the Origin and Use of the Potter's Wheel during the Iron Age in the Iberian Peninsula. Interpretive Possibilities and Limitations

Abstract

An abundance of past research has addressed Iron Age pottery in the Iberian Peninsula since the beginning of archaeological analysis in Spain. However, it has mainly focused on examining historical-cultural aspects linked to specific chronologies and typologies. It is only rarely that studies have been concerned with production processes. Ethnography has traditionally been used to make direct approximations and extrapolate the information gaps around this issue, using the pre-industrial pottery practices, which still survive in the Iberian Peninsula. Thus, to explain informally how the Iron Age indigenous societies modelled pottery on a wheel, it is usually assumed without discussion that the potter’s kick-wheel was used to generate kinetic energy. This paper aims to reconsider this discourse and, at the same time, raises new proposals and interpretative alternatives. For this purpose, archaeological production contexts have been re-examined, focusing on the Iron Age site of Las Cogotas. Furthermore, experiments were executed based on the data collected in these contexts. Indeed, the results obtained indicate that the technical gestures of modelling in Iron Age pottery centers of the Iberian Peninsula would be linked to the use of hand/stick-spun potter’s wheels typical of Levantine traditions of the late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean.

Keywords

• ceramics
• iron age
• portugal
• spain