Mega City

We’ll get to the pottery in a moment. First, some observations about the pre-history of Ukraine’s Black Sea region and it’s rich flood plains. This time and place is usually described in terms of aristocratic tribes, lavish tombs, and lots of bloodshed. In the 1970’s, Soviet archeologists looked deeper. They found several so-called “mega-cities” dating from 4,100 to 3,300 bce, long before the era of more well known city-states in Mesopotamia’s “Fertile Crescent.” But Cold War politics led western scholars to generally cold shoulder these new discoveries.

Still, archeologists unanimously agree; where elites exist, you know it – palaces and temples, city walls, bling-encrusted tombs, etc. But here there was no evidence of monumental buildings, no military fortifications, nor even a centralized government. It seems a huge population peaceably self-governed for a millennia.

The cities were all close together, 6-9 miles apart. They had extended trade networks and built with timber, but with minimal environmental impact. Buildings were uniformly rectangular, around 16′ x 32′. Neighborhood and city centers, where monumental or administrative buildings should be, were just open space. The largest city is called Taljanky, sprawling out over 300 hectares and with an estimated population of well over 10,000 – larger than Uruk, Mohenjo-Daro, or Göbekli Tepe. And all this happened before the arrival of agriculture to the region! What? Then, in the middle of 4th century bce these cities were mysteriously abandoned.

And now the pottery. Although building layouts indicated rigid social uniformity, a closer look inside showed an astonishing diversity. Each house had different variations of eating vessels, along with different ceramic items for domestic rituals, ie; model houses and tiny replicas of furniture and eating equipment. And lots of ceramic female figurines. Their pottery was among finest in pre-history, with polychrome designs of mesmerizing intensity in a dazzling variety of forms. It was as if each neighborhood, almost each household, invented it’s own unique style.

I can’t quite wrap my head around all this. No rulers. No temples. No warfare. No agriculture. Just tens of thousand of people living side by side for over a thousand years. We don’t even know their name. One of the few things we know for sure is that during all this time they made incredibly diverse and beautiful pottery. I find this somehow extremely satisfying. And also very humbling. I love my profession.

Reading:
The Dawn of Everything. A New History of Humanity. David Graeber and David Wengrow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux/New York. 2021.

The Hit Parade #4: Ceramic Insulator for Low Tension Power Lines

Are David and Goliath stories true?  Can a humble insulator be considered among the ceramic greats?  To answer, consider who made this specific insulator, when, and why. 

During the 1980’s in Sandinista-led Nicaragua, the “Organizacion Revolucionario de Descapacitados,” or “Revolutionary Organization of Handicapped Veterans,” (ORD), ran a stoneware pottery shop as part of their rehabilitation training program.

Their clay came from a deposit near the village of El Sauce (“El Sow-se”) that displayed, along the length of a long gully, the entire erosion process from feldspathic rock, to white primary clay, to secondary ball clay, then to earthenware.  Their glaze consisted primarily of dust from Momotombo, Nicaragua’s largest volcano. 

Potters for Peace helped the ORD develop a project to produce ceramic insulators for a fraction of the price of existing insulators bought from Brazil.  (I built a kiln with the ORD for this project). 

A US-created coalition of political parties (an open reality in Nicaragua that included some bizarre bedfellows) electorally ousted the Sandinistas in 1990.  An application for US Agency for International Development (AID) funds was quickly granted.  The AID package included funds to purchase (only) US made insulators at four times the ORD’s price.  With a stroke of a pen, the ORD contract was broken.  Their pottery shop faced closure.

Potters for Peace mounted an awareness/fund-raising campaign featuring various elementary schools in the US asking the AID to amend their package to include ORD insulators.  The kids raffled insulators and wrote letters to their representatives and to the AID.  The campaign worked!  The contract was (partially) renewed.

So once upon a time, a humble little clay object found itself smack in the middle of the Cold War.  A small, impoverished country’s war wounded unwittingly found their gesture of self-determination pitted against an antagonistic super power’s economic might.  With this ceramic insulator as their icon, the underdog won. 

The moral of the story:  Truly progressive, “politically inspired” ceramics efforts encompass projects well beyond the flash and glitz of protest, criticism, and confrontation.  These powerful efforts can be found in the most unlikely of places. 

This beautiful little ceramic insulator, my friends, is the real deal.