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22. Ancient Greek Ceramics

 

November 15, 2025

 

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Ancient Greek Ceramics

Claire, Emily, and Yueming dive into classical archaeology in today’s episode, detailing the history and art of ancient Greek ceramics and pottery creation.


Sources:

Transcript: 

Emily: Hello friends, and welcome back to Anthro.mp3. We’re students from UMass who love anthropology. Anthro hub is a website we help run that is full of all things Anthro. Make sure to check it out to look for some incredible blog posts and creative works made from students from our school and others. My name is Emily, and I’ll be one of your hosts for today’s episode.

 

Yueming: I’m Yueming. I’m usually your tech crew, but I will be hosting today!

 

Claire: And my name is Claire. I’ll be your third host today. We’re covering a topic that I am super, super excited about, because it’s actually my personal research and study specialization. Today we’re looking at Greek ceramics. So I just want to chat a little about-  a little bit about my field school experience here, because it’s a field school is a possible requirement for a lot of students in the Anthropology major. And it’s a really awesome experience that I got to have. I went through the Classics Department because my specialization in anthropology is archeology.

So I was able to do a little bit of interdisciplinary work there, which was very, very cool. So I went to Greece, which is where I started to really get to know Greek ceramics and start to fall in love with them. And I was on the Cycladic island of Kaya. It’s a small fishing Island, and I was looking at ceramic pieces from the Bronze Age, which is, you know, roughly 3000 to 1050 BCE, or years Before Common Era. And that was just something that really helped me fall in love. So I know that other people that are here today have done field schools, not necessarily in archeology, but it’s just such a great experience. And I personally just recommend to every anthropology student trying to participate in a field school, because they are so helpful and they help you find what you love. So I just wanted to bring that up as we started. But in order to understand Greek ceramics fully, I figure we should start by chatting about a little bit of general history on ceramic creation itself in the history of humankind.

 

Emily: Yeah, so humans have been making ceramics for a very long time. The earliest ceramics found can be dated as early as 28,000 BCE.

 

Yueming: Right, those being gravidian fired clay figurines. The gravidian was an Upper Paleolithic culture from Europe, and are known for their stone tools, mammoths, hunting, cave paintings, and, of course, their clay female figurines, and then we see the first pottery fragments in China dating closer to 20,000 BCE. 

 

Claire: Right, so pottery was very widely used across the world, and it tells us a lot about culture in different locations and across different time periods. Though we’re covering Greek pottery and general ceramics in particular today, ceramic creation was a huge part of civilization growth across Rome, Egypt, China, like you said, parts of South America, the modern Czech Republic, the list is pretty endless. 

 

Emily: Yeah, and looking at ceramics says a lot about ancient culture, like you said, Claire, we can work with chemists and other scientists to do composition analysis to determine use in certain types of circumstances, but archeologists tend to have to analyze context and physical characteristics to make an educated assumption or decision about item use. For example, a glazed but otherwise undecorated pot found in a room of an old house with many other storage vessels may have been a container for storing water or liquids, however, and small, intricately decorated vessel found near a site of an altar may have been used as an offering or like a decoration. 

 

Yueming: Right, there are also some potteries that might have been used for cooking. Those pottery tend to have a black color on the outside surface, which is a sign of burning them over fire. I also went to a field school in Italy last summer, and we saw a lot of those ceramic fragments.

 

Claire: It’s so cool being able to see the little, like, the char marks, like you’re saying, and that’s how we can tell that they might have been used for cooking or firing certain things. And, I just think that’s so cool. And it’s really interesting to see how widely varied ceramic use was. My personal favorite research topic is, of course, Greek and it’s probably ceramics found in tombs, graves and burial sites, the paintings on them, the shapes of them, the sizes and amounts of them in a location, and then, of course, the location itself, where the items were found. It all tells us so much about how people dealt with grief and loss in ancient eras. How did a peasant’s burial or a slave’s burial differ from a king’s or a warrior’s; what items were buried with who and what stories do they tell? Vessels and figurines that were buried are usually also a bit more well preserved than others that weren’t buried, and that’s because they avoided a lot of weather and sun damage.

 

Emily: Claire, you actually did an internship on Greek ceramics, right?

 

Claire: Yeah, Emily! It was such a wonderful opportunity. I was an intern for the Classics Department here at UMass, where we worked with the Marios philippides collection. Marios Philippides was a professor here at UMass, and when he unfortunately passed recently, his wife donated his collection of ancient Greek artifacts to the Classics Department. One of my professors, Shannon Hogue, she’s the one who actually brought me on my field school- uh, She reached out to the Samuel H Kress Foundation, which is a nonprofit foundation dedicated to historical conservation and education, and she actually got our school a grant that allowed us to pursue some really in depth research and cataloging of the artifacts. So I spent one semester analyzing the pieces and working with three other interns, two of whom were also in the anthropology department here at UMass to create an online database that catalogs every donated piece. I spent a second semester with the internship diving into research on a topic of my choice in order to create a gallery exhibit with select pieces from the collection.

 

Yueming: That’s really interesting. Greek ceramics are super cool. There’s a lot of shapes and used for pottery vessels. In particular, they can generally be separated into four main categories, though, which makes it a bit easier to remember. First of all, we see large transport and storage vessels. They were very big, very heavy, and had incredibly strong handles to support their contentS. 

 

Emily: Right! And some common forms in that category, includes a large amphora, the pethos or the pelki, something like that would be found in the context that I mentioned earlier, like within a storage room for holding liquids or grain.

 

Yueming: The second main category would consist of mixing vessels. This typically didn’t have handles or feet, and would be used to mix water and wine or to act as a container at a party or gathering to hold some form of celebratory or ceremonial drink. A common form of this category is something called a crater. Thirdly, we see drugs and cops. These are pretty versatile and include vessel types like catheters or a ski FOS. The final general category would be vases for holding oils, perfumes or cosmetics. Claire will talk more about this category later, but an example of this category would be the alabaster.

 

Emily: So, Claire, I think you’ve mentioned before that you curated a small exhibit for this internship.

 

Claire: Yeah, that’s.. that’s correct for my in depth research and exhibit. In the second semester of my internship, I chose to work with attic, white ground lecoy and attic black figure lecothoi that were in the collection. That is a lot of words in very quick succession that probably don’t mean a lot right now. So lechathoi is the plural of the word lecathos. A lecathos is a form of ancient Greek ceramic phase, and there’s a couple different forms of lekythos, such as acorn or squat, are some of the names for them, but they were all used for the same general purpose, which was to hold and pour oil. 

 

Claire: So they’re in the fourth category that you Meng mentioned in situations like the Olympic Games, small lekythos holding perfumed oil were given as prizes to winning competitors. We also see them being used to pour this perfumed oil onto brides or perhaps onto the ground in front of soldiers departing for war as an offering, the pouring out of liquid onto the ground or onto an altar or a body or something similar was called a libation, and it was an offering to the gods in order to request their favor. I am going to bring up libations briefly later, so definitely remember that. Term. Anyway, around the end of the sixth century BCE, we start to see these lekythos’s showing up in tombs as grave goods, particularly in the classical period, which roughly spans the fifth and fourth centuries. BCE, we see the attic white ground style of lecathos start to come to light. For context, during this period, we see the rise of Athens, the Peloponnesian and Persian Wars, proto Germanic spoken language for our linguists. Today, we usually time the end of the period to around Alexander the Great’s death, which was in 323 BCE. 

 

Claire: So, attic is a term that refers to the geographic region that the clay used to create a vessel comes from.The region of Attica, is a peninsula that encircles Athens, most notably. The clay from this area was used really often for a couple reasons in pottery. First of all, Athens was a hugely massive trade hub, so other city states or polis over the centuries were often in the area to buy or access the clay. The clay here was also very high quality. It was very fine, meaning it didn’t have many chunky bits or pieces of rock in it, which meant that it fired much more evenly and ended up being much more durable. It also has a high iron content, which gives it an incredibly iconic reddish orange coloring when it’s fired. This coloring and fine wear allowed for it to be smoothly glazed and for the colors of the glaze to show up opaque and bright when they were fired, particularly black glaze. When people think of Greek pottery, they tend to think of black subjects on a bright red background. This is a style known as attic black figure. The inverse, when the background is painted with black glaze and the figures are left red, is called attic red figure.

 

Claire: I tend to focus on black figure items, along with another style called white ground. This is where the body of the ceramic piece is completely painted white and figures are glazed over top in various colors and glazes. This style is most commonly seen on lekythos and most particularly found in tombs and grave sites. A big reason for this is because the painted surface was very fragile, so it was typically only used for ritual or fancy events. These lekythos were only ever really produced within the Greek classical period, at least to our knowledge, and mainly between the years of 500 and 400 BCE. 

 

Yueming: So, what exactly was in your exhibit?

 

Claire: Well, my exhibit consists of seven artifacts from the collection, all of which are lekythos, most of which are nearly entirely preserved. That said, the Keystone piece in the exhibit is actually a white ground pottery fragment, or sherd, which has a scene depicting what was likely typical funerary ritual of the time. There is a woman on the left of the sherd and a man on the right. The two figures are physically separated by a tomb painted in between them. When looking at other similar pieces from certain museums, perhaps these similar pieces would be called comparanda, or comparative pieces. And when referencing primary sources from the time, one can make an educated assumption that the male figure on the right is likely a spirit. Though the fragmentation of this piece does not allow the archeologist or any viewer to confidently see what the woman on the left is holding or doing, since the breaking of it happens just around her wrist, we can make an educated guess based on recorded actions and literature. Perhaps she is pouring oil from a lekythos of her own onto the tomb as a way of asking the deities to look after the deceased. That would be a libation, the ritual I mentioned earlier. The spirit on the right may be the woman’s husband or perhaps her son, and in the piece, you can see that he watches her from across the tomb as she mourns him. The tomb seems to serve as a physical representation of the barrier between the living world and the world after death. Anyway, based on stories and records of the time, we see that the woman’s actions helped to complete the man’s circle of earthly life, preparing and protecting his soul for the afterlife through ritual. These actions of the woman immortalized the man’s memory, and are further immortalized through the artistic representation on the lekythos sherd that is now in Herter Hall here at UMass.

 

Claire: There were more than only figure paintings on the pieces, though most of the lekythos in my collection had lattice and meander patterns. These patterns represent unity or continuation. So, think of a pie with a lattice crust. The strips cross over each other, weaving like a blanket or perhaps a traditional basket. The meander pattern is like a river, an unending, strong flow of life. We also see images of ivy vines with berries or palmette leaves. Ivy was a sacred plant associated with Dionysus and often was depicted as a wreath upon the bodies of the deceased. The ivy vine became a symbol of release and perhaps immortality of the soul in the afterlife. The Palmetto,likely originally taken from Greek interactions with Egyptian mythology and beliefs based on trade routes and everything. The palmette represents the cycle of life and birth. If you look at literature and art throughout 1000s of years and across the globe, plants are a pretty common symbol for cyclical life and rebirth. Think of a tree losing its leaves and regaining them, or a fruit bursting open and spreading its seeds, or the myth of Persephone and Demeter in the seasons. Even after what feels like an ending, life continues, in a way. A new one that we may not be able to see or understand. This is what the Greeks represented on their grave gifts. What I mean by this is that, when an ancient Greek was buried, their tomb held much more than just their body. Though varying over time and in relation to status, many people were sent to the afterlife with grave gifts, offerings for deities of movement and transition or of celebration and comfort, like Hermes or Dionysus, or gifts for the Spirit to help them acclimate to the next realm.

 

Emily: Wow, that’s really interesting, and that’s definitely something I have to think about more later. So like you said, we’ve learned a lot about what funeral rituals of the Classical Period look like. Thanks to the vase paintings like the one you researched on the lekythos in the collection. Thanks to philosophers and writers of the era, we’re able to learn a lot about what these scenes mean and represented to the people of the era.

 

Claire: Precisely! That’s a really good way of putting it. Accounts and records from historians of the time like Herodotus or even epitaphs on graves help us to understand more deeply how people of ancient times understood and processed the one thing all humans share, which is death. The universality of it is kind of beautiful, in my opinion.

 

Emily: Yeah, so speaking of ending things, we’re approaching the end of our episode, but you’ve given us a lot to think about for the future. So thank you all for tuning in to our show today, another thanks to our team members and our collaborators at Anthrohub! 

 

Yueming: To stay connected, you can find us on instagram @anthro.mpx. You can also find our sources, transcripts of each episode and more in our answer hub show notes, we’ll link some of the articles on the exhibits we mentioned today to our show notes as well. I was one of your hosts today, Yueming, joined by Emily, Claire, and some members of our tech crew! Special, thanks to Phuong for helping with the recording today.

 

Claire: If you enjoyed this episode, then make sure to keep an eye out on our Instagram for future updates on upcoming shows, specials and events, catch us next time and have a great day, friends!



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