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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2015
For modern Europeans the wheel is the most characteristic implement used in the making of pottery. The history of the potter’ wheel, which has lately been described briefly and clearly by the German, Adolf Rieth,l evidently goes back several thousands of years. In southern Mesopotamia the potter’s wheel can be traced continuously from at least the fifth millennium before Christ, and the Egyptians ado ted the technique 3000 years before our era. It is characteristic t 1 at pottery-making with the help of the wheel is man’s work, and that it nearly always seems to belong to an advancing urban culture with its associated specialization of labour. It stands, as a rule, for greater efficiency, and indicates, on the whole, artistic degeneration—at any rate in early times, until man has learnt to bring his implement o perfection. At the same time the old technique survived and took on hybrid forms with the new. A similar relation can be observed throughout the history of Danish pottery.
1 Adolf Rieth, Die Entwicklung der Töpferscheibe, Leipzig, 1939.
2 A. G. Jensen, Jydepotten vort Lands œlaste Haandwœrk, Copenhagen, 1924 (principal reference) ; C. Nyrop, Dansk Pottemageri, Copenhagen, 1882 ; F. Sehested, Jydepotteindustrien, Copenhagen, 1881 ; Laurids Smith, ‘Om de sorte jydske Lerkars Fabrikations Maade. . . .’, Iris, Copenhagen, 1791.
3 Axel Steensberg, ‘Primitive Black Pottery in Jutland’, Folk-Liv (International Journal of European Ethnology and Folklore), 1939, 113-46.
4 The illustrations in this article are in one respect different from those published in Folk-Liv, in that five of them were photographed by Dr W. Iversen of Vejrup. The rest were taken by the author while studying the only two surviving women potters, Maren Hansen of Vejrup, and Mathilde Nielsen of Sønder Elkær, near Billund.
5 Arthur Mitchell, The Past in the Present (Edinburgh, 1880), p. 28. [See also ANTIQUITY, 1939, XII, 280-2.—E.C.C.].
6 Cf. Norwegian experiment in Johs. Bøe, Jernalderens Keramik i Norge (Bergen, 1931), p. 210.
7 L. Franchet, Céramique Primitive (Paris, 1911), 20 ff.