Ceramics and Circulation: 800-1250
Published in A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture 2017
Pottery has a special place in the study of the past, a place which derives from its material properties. Pottery survives like no other material. Fired pottery is brittle and breaks, but it is otherwise immensely durable. Most metals and all organic materials rust, corrode, decay, or rot: fragments of a well‐fired pot can survive millennia of burial even in extreme soil conditions that would destroy other materials. Glazes, like glass, may be vulnerable to chemical attack but well‐fired clay is resistant. In contrast to other common materials of the pre‐modern world, pottery is not easily repaired and cannot be recycled (Milwright 2001). The stones, bricks, and wood of architecture are easy to plunder and reuse. Metal is reworked or smelted down; cloth, if not repairable or reusable, is collected for paper‐making; broken glass is valuable in the manufacture of new glass; wood is easily repurposed, if only as fuel. Evidence from archaeology shows that the systematic recovery of recyclable materials has been practiced everywhere – the picking over of rubbish dumps allows the poorest to scratch a subsistence living. Pottery, however, has no value as a recycled material – broken bits are of little use, the clay has been irreversibly changed by the firing process, and the labor and fuel, the key costs involved, are simply unrecoverable. These two qualities – durability and non‐recyclability – mean that pottery is discarded at the end of its useful life, but it does not disappear.
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