Clay pastes pottery

All except stage 4, forming and shaping, which involves mainly stylistic considerations, entail chemical and physical changes to the components as well as to the entire clay paste used for making pottery. All the stages except 4 are, therefore, discussed in some detail in the paragraphs that follow. 

THE USE OF FIRE TO transform CLAY PASTE into solid ceramic vessels may have been one of the earliest efforts at chemistry. Since the earliest times, pottery has been made by using clays formed by the weathering of rocks. Sedimentary deposits containing clay minerals also contain fragments of other minerals that are broken from the source rocks as they weather. The chemical composition of the sediments used as a clay source determined some of the characteristics of the pottery that was produced. 

Homan Black Lustrous Pottery, made of any tenacious clay in the neighborhood of the manufacturer, varies in its color from a rich deep black to a slate or Olive hu. The paste, in many instances, is red, grey, or even whits the black tint of the ware being due to the glaze, which is Instrous and has a metalloid aspect. Many vessels of this class are of small size and simple in form, as in Vis-... 

Figure 1. Palestinian clay types, in lower row, reading right to left, Kaolin (Negev), red field clay, yellow limestone clay. Upper row, four pieces from Gaza, all made from red field clay. Pottery fragment in lower row Hebron, made from mix of red and yellow clays with salt added to give a white surface to the red paste.

One of the potentially more productive avenues of research using LA-ICP-MS involves the characterization of paints and glazes used in the decoration of pottery. Just as bulk analysis of clays by INAA, XRF, ICP-MS, and other analytical methods have demonstrated to be a productive avenue of research for making interpretations regarding past cultural systems, chemical characterization... 

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