Crafting Legacies

Someone will remember us by traces

in another time.

Someone's hands will hold what these hands create

in another time.

What will you leave behind?

Yesterday in a bout of discovery, I was consumed by the ruins of Pompeii. Unwrapping the timeline of disaster, I got curious of the people themselves and the shared human condition of unpredictability across centuries.

Being a potter, a key to understanding became the pottery left behind. Earth dug up locally, subjected to fire and made permanent enough to long outlive the maker.

Digging deeper I came across the accounts of Laetitia Cavassa, an archaeologist conducting a study on Pompeii’s pottery sites and objects. She writes and I quote,

September 2012

"In our first week of excavation we discovered unfired clay vases, covered by the pumice stones that had burst forth with the volcano’s eruption. These vases were produced in 79 CE by potters and placed on the ground awaiting firing in the kiln. The eruption of Vesuvius froze this moment.

We were the first ones to touch these unfired vases after the artisans who produced them!

Emotion swept through the entire team upon the discovery. We were the first ones to touch these unfired vases after the artisans who produced them! They are well conserved enough for us to immediately identify them: they are goblets decorated with small incisions, and covered with a reddish-orange engobe, that the Pompeiians used for drinking.

This discovery was doubly important, for not only did we identify the workshop’s production from the very first days of the excavation, but it was also one of the rare instances of unfired vases discovered in a workshop."

November 2018

"Six years after the discovery of unfired vases, we are now tracing back to the hands that made these objects. This time we’ve come back to Pompeii not to excavate, but to actually identify the potters! This research has taken on another dimension. A year ago I ran into Aurore Lambert, an anthropologist who has been interested in potters for some time, or more specifically in the fingerprints they left on vases. She is developing a research program on fingerprints, and offered to make Pompeii’s workshops into a study case. I accepted without hesitation.

We spent ten days sitting in this storeroom, inspecting each ceramic fragment to detect a fingerprint.

For a number of years, I have wondered about these traces of fingers, which are so moving, bearing witness to the life of the potters."

This bring to mind two aspects - one is the sentimentality and another, the liability.

Pottery as opposed to the popular view of it being 'sustainable' is subtractive in nature. True that it is earth itself - but it is earth that has been chemically morphed into something durable and relatively resistant to the elements. The materials are mined and put together in recipes with fixed proportions to achieve desired effects. Most of us (myself included) get it delivered to our doorsteps in bags and it's easy to forget the origin.

The solution is not to stop creating, for the world would be bleak bereft of art, but to be responsible and mindful of what all and how much we create. Create for the need of creating but not for the greed.

And I would like to leave you with the question - What will you leave behind?

More of Laetitia's accounts can be read here - https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/tracing-back-the-potters-of-pompeii