Dr. Choleva is an archaeologist specializing in Aegean prehistory, pottery-forming techniques, and the anthropology of technology. She holds a BA from the University of Athens and an MA and PhD from the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
She has been a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Louvain (2016–2018), the Fitch Laboratory of the British School at Athens (2019), the University of Athens (2020–2022), and the Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University (2022–2023). In 2021, she was an adjunct professor of prehistoric archaeology at the University of Thessaloniki. She is involved in various field and research projects in Greece and Turkey, while being co-editor of the Greek journal on human sciences called Krisi – Biannual Scientific Review.
Maria’s research focuses on the materiality of technology. Her projects investigate the appropriation and transfer of the innovation of the potter’s wheel in the Aegean during the Bronze Age, with a special emphasis on the role of body techniques in shaping social roles and cultural knowledge. At ANAMED, Maria will be working on her project entitled “Making an Artisan for the Potter’s Wheel in the Prehistoric Aegean: An Anthropological Interdisciplinary Approach to Artifacts.” This research will trace the connectivity between pottery chaînes opératoires in mainland Greece and western Anatolia in the third millennium BCE by employing an innovative interdisciplinary approach that combines archaeological inquiry, scientifically based methods, and social theories of practice and embodiment.
Project title: Creating an artisan for the potter’s wheel in the prehistoric Aegean: an interdisciplinary anthropological approach to the artifacts.
Fellow: Maria Choleva
My ANAMED project explores the cultural connectivity between mainland Greece and western Anatolia during the latter half of the third millennium, focusing on the appearance and adoption of a transformative technological innovation: the potter’s wheel—a tool, the emergence of which revolutionized prehistoric pottery-making by introducing an original “set” of new physical modalities and kinesthetic skills for shaping clay.[1] By emphasizing the embodied relationship between artisans and artifacts, the project aims to understand the cultural significance of the potter’s wheel, by highlighting the role of learned body techniques in shaping and defining artisan’s identities. This project forms part of an ongoing monograph that examines, over the longue durée perspective, the appropriation of the new tool in learning and practice environments across the Early to Middle Bronze Age by means of a multi-site comparative approach to pottery assemblages coming from sites on the western Anatolian coast and eastern Aegean islands (Bakla Tepe, Liman Tepe, Troy, Palamari, Emporio, Heraion) and the central Aegean (Lefkandi, Pefkakia, Lerna, Tirynthe, Tsoungiza, Aspis).
Towards an embodied understanding of the potter’s wheel
In our modern industrialized world, technology is often represented as a disembodied entity, characterized by its functional and utilitarian aspects, detached from the social and cultural experiences of producers. The premise that technological innovations follow a self-directed, linear evolutionary trajectory, driven by the pursuit of efficiency and utility, has dominated archaeological discourse about technology until recently, retrojecting onto the past as a transcultural regularity.[2] Immured in this instrumentalist and evolutionistic framework, the innovation of the potter’s wheel was assumed to have been adopted due to its alleged techno-economic advantages over hand-forming, and it was perceived as a “technical advancement” of prehistoric societies, enabling improvement and intensification of pottery production.[3]
However, social approaches to material culture, drawing upon the concepts of the French anthropology of techniques, have challenged the Western modernist conception of technology, emphasizing the socio-historical character of people’s practical engagement with production.[4] Anthropological views on technology stress, indeed, that production techniques, materials, and tools are deeply intertwined with local cultural knowledge, particularly in pre-modern (prehistoric) societies, where the physical act of crafting held central importance in daily life and social reproduction.
The cultural embeddedness of crafting practices can be traced in the early paths of the potter’s wheel in the Aegean and western Anatolia during the Early Bronze Age. Introduced as a technological transfer from central Anatolia to western Anatolia and the central Aegean,[5] possibly via episodes of human mobility in the region, the potter’s wheel emerges as a craft with limited visibility alongside the dominant hand-made production techniques. The new technology appears to be monopolized by small communities of potters dispersed across various locations, sharing a rigid and well-defined social role in the organization of production: the exclusive making of a specific repertoire of drinking and dining vessels inspired by Anatolian styles,[6] likely intended for use in the context of small-scale feast events. Rather than being widely adopted, the new tool remained, therefore, inaccessible to most potters in the Aegean and western Anatolia, confined by social constraints that determined its cultural use for centuries.[7]
Building upon this perspective, my project delves into a social anthropological approach to studying the potter’s wheel, with a special emphasis on the embodied nature of the act of making. Inspired by social theories of embodiment and praxis, it embraces, as an analytical hermeneutic device, the anthropological concept of body techniques[8]—defined as the enskillment of the human body in traditional methods of doing and making things, which are socially learned and transmitted and culturally meaningful.[9] Through this lens, the aim of the project is to trace the corporeality of the potter’s wheel and the modalities of its practice and transmission within different Early Bronze Age communities.
To explore these aspects, my project applies an interdisciplinary approach to pottery assemblages, focusing on “reading” the material traces of bodily movements, gestures, materials, and tools involved in pottery-making. Drawing from experimental and ethno-archaeological research on the identification of techniques through diagnostic macro- and micro-features,[10] this approach encompasses several methods: macroscopic examination of surface features resulting from forming operations, X-Ray analysis of selected samples to investigate clay formation by examining the orientation of clay components, and finally, thin-section petrographic study for analyzing ceramic fabrics. This combined methodology allows for an integrated and comprehensive examination of artifacts and their production processes. It offers insight into chaînes opératoires, that is, the sequence of operations involved in transforming clays into ceramic objects (fabric recipes, shaping, finishing, and firing).
Connectivity of tool-body techniques
During my ANAMED fellowship, my research primarily focused on the comparative study of the manipulation of the potter’s wheel in pottery production among two settlements with different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds during the Early Bronze Age: Bakla Tepe in coastal western Türkiye and Lefkandi in eastern central Greece. The aim was to investigate the degree of connectivity among users of the wheel in terms of learned motor-sensory skills and technical knowledge. My work centered, at the inter-community level, on comparing the gestures associated with the wheel by examining the technical features on wheel-made pots and recognizing the shared modus operandi of the tool. At the community level, I focused on the modalities of learning and transmission of wheel-forming techniques by examining the context of production of wheel-made pots in terms of chaînes opératoires, contrasting them with the technical choices made for the co-existing hand-made production.
Aspects of this research were presented at the international workshop “Mobility in the Bronze Age Balkans” held at Villa Vigoni, the German-Italian Centre for the European Dialogue (17–20 April 2024, Italy), as well as at the conference “SCAPECON 6. Contextualizing Fire in Aegean” as a key-note paper in Session 4, “Flames of Clay Transformation,” at the University of Thessaloniki (2–3 December 2023, Greece). This study will also be published in a forthcoming paper, co-authored with Evangelia Kiriatzi, Director of the Fitch Laboratory, British School at Athens, and Vasıf Şahoğlu, Professor at Ankara University, Archaeology Department, and Director of the Bakla Tepe and Liman Tepe excavations.
In this paper, the results of the technological analyses will be presented, demonstrating that users of the potter’s wheel on both sides of the Aegean Sea employed a common body technique, indicating their training within the same kinesthetic paradigm. This suggests a shared resilient, embodied relationship with the tool. In an era marked by increased human mobility and the transfer of artifacts in the eastern Mediterranean,[11] this intimacy among artisans engaged in a specialized craft across mainland Greece and western Anatolia during the Early Bronze Age implies communities with strong cultural bonds, which maintained, in different socio-cultural environments, their traditional embodied ways of pottery-making.
My residency at ANAMED broadened the scope of this study, allowing me to integrate my research questions into a wider hermeneutic and conceptual framework. Not only did I deepen my understanding of archaeological literature and Bronze Age material culture in western Anatolia, enhancing my grasp of prehistoric archaeology in Türkiye, but I also engaged with the work and the ideas of researchers studying artisans and artifacts in the eastern Mediterranean across different periods, from prehistory to early modern times. This interaction was instrumental in helping me explore various perspectives on the interface of humans with the materiality of things, particularly in the context of crafts. It enabled me to zoom out from the specific focus of my research and consider the broader question of the symbiotic relationship between tools, materials, and makers in non-Western, non-industrial societies.
References
Choleva, Maria. “Travelling with the Potter’s Wheel in the Early Bronze Age Aegean.” The Annual of the British School at Athens 115 (2021): 1–46.
Dobrès, Marcia-Anne. Technology and Social Agency: Outlining a Practice Framework for Archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.
Gosselain, Olivier. P. “Materializing Identities: An African Perspective.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 7 (2000): 187–217.
Ingold, Tim. “Tools, Minds and Machines. An Excursion in the Philosophy of Technology.” In The Perception of the Environment. Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill, edited by Tim Ingold, 294–311. London/New York: Routledge, 2000.
Knappett, Carl. “Resisting Innovation? Learning, Cultural Evolution and the Potter’s Wheel in the Mediterranean Bronze Age.” In Cultural Phylogenetics: Concepts and Applications in Archaeology, edited by Larissa Mendoza, 97–111. StraffonDordrecht: Springer International Publishing, 2016.
Kozatsas, Jannis. The Dialectic of Practice and the Logical Structure of the Tool. Philosophy, Archaeology and the Anthropology of Technology. Praehistorica Mediterranean 7. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2020.
Mauss, Marcel [1936]. “Techniques of the Body.” In Marcel Mauss. Techniques, Technology and Civilization, edited by Nathan Schlanger, 77–95. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006.
Pfaffenberger, Bryan. “Social Anthropology of Technology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 491–516.
Rahmstorf, Lorenz. “Zur Ausbreitung vorderasiatischer Innovationen in der frühbronzezeitlichen Ägäis.” Prähistorische Zeitschrift 81 (2006): 49–96.
Roux, Valentıne, and Daniela Corbetta. Le Tour du potier: Spécialisation Artisanale et Compétences Techniques. Paris: CNRS Editions, 1990.
Roux, Valentine. Ceramics and Society: A Technological Approach to Archaeological Assemblage. Cham: Springer International, 2019.
Rutter, Jeremy B. “Migrant Drinking Assemblages in Aegean Bronze Age Settings.” In Materiality and Social Practice: Transformative Capacities of Intercultural Encounters, edited by Joseph Maran and Philipp W. Stockhammer, 73–88. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2012.
Schlanger, Nathan. “Introduction. Technological Commitments: Marcel Mauss and the Study of Techniques in the French Social Sciences.” In Marcel Mauss. Techniques, Technology and Civilization, edited by Nathan Schlanger, 1–30. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006.
Şahoğlu, Vasıf. “The Depas and Tankard Vessels.” In ARCANE Interregional Vol. I Ceramics, edited by Marc Lebeau, 289–311. Brepols: Brepols Publishers, 2014.
Şahoğlu, Vasıf. “The Early Bronze Age Anatolian Trade Network and its Role on the Transformation of the Anatolian and Aegean Communities.” In Connecting Cultures: Trade and Interconnections in the Ancient Near East from the Beginning until the End of the Roman Period, edited by Vasıf Şahoğlu, Müge Şevketoğlu, and Yiğit H. Erbil, 115–31. Ankara: Ankara University Press, 2019.
Türkteki, Murat. “Batı ve Orta Anadolu’da Çark Yapımı Çanak Çömleğin Ortaya Çıkışı ve Yayılımı.” MASROP E-Journal 6/7 (May 2012): 38–111.
Wendrich, Willeke, ed. Archaeology and Apprenticeship: Body Knowledge, Identity, and Communities of Practice. Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 2016.
[1] Cf. Valentıne Roux and Daniela Corbetta, Le tour du potier: spécialisation artisanale et compétences techniques (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1990), 69–78.
[2] E.g. Bryan Pfaffenberger, “Social Anthropology of Technology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 491–516.
[3] Cf. Carl Knappett, “Resisting Innovation? Learning, Cultural Evolution and the Potter’s Wheel in the Mediterranean Bronze Age,” in Cultural Phylogenetics: Concepts and Applications in Archaeology, ed. Larissa Mendoza (StraffonDordrecht: Springer International Publishing, 2016), 97–111.
[4] Marcia-Anne Dobrès, Technology and Social Agency: Outlining a Practice Framework for Archaeology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 160–80; Tim Ingold, “Tools, Minds and Machines. An Excursion in the Philosophy of Technology,” in The Perception of the Environment. Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, ed. Tim Ingold (London/New York: Routledge, 2000), 294–311; Jannis Kozatsas, The Dialectic of Practice and the Logical Structure of the Tool. Philosophy, Archaeology and the Anthropology of Technology, Praehistorica Mediterranea 7 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2020).
[5] Murat Türkteki, “Batı ve Orta Anadolu’da Çark Yapımı Çanak Çömleğin Ortaya Çıkışı ve Yayılımı,” MASROP E-Journal 6/7 (May 2012): 38–111.
[6] Jeremy B. Rutter, “Migrant Drinking Assemblages in Aegean Bronze Age Settings,” in Materiality and Social Practice: Transformative Capacities of Intercultural Encounters, eds. Joseph Maran and Philipp W. Stockhammer (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2012), 73–88; Vasıf Şahoğlu, “The Depas and Tankard Vessels,” in ARCANE Interregional Vol. I Ceramics, ed. Marc Lebeau (Brepols: Brepols Publishers, 2014), 289–311.
[7] Maria Choleva, “Travelling with the Potter’s Wheel in the Early Bronze Age Aegean,” The Annual of the British School at Athens 115 (2021): 1–46.
[8] Marcel Mauss [1936], “Techniques of the Body”, in Marcel Mauss. Techniques, Technology and Civilization, ed. Nathan Schlanger (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 77–95.
[9] E.g. Nathan Schlanger, “Introduction. Technological Commitments: Marcel Mauss and the Study of Techniques in the French Social Sciences,” in Marcel Mauss. Techniques, Technology and Civilization, ed. Nathan Schlanger (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 1–30; Willeke Wendrich, ed., Archaeology and Apprenticeship: Body Knowledge, Identity, and Communities of Practice (Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 2016).
[10] Valentine Roux, Ceramics and Society: A Technological Approach to Archaeological Assemblages (Cham: Springer International, 2019).
[11] Cf. Lorenz Rahmstorf, “Zur Ausbreitung vorderasiatischer Innovationen in der frühbronzezeitlichen Ägäis,” Prähistorische Zeitschrift 81 (2006): 49–96; Vasıf Şahoğlu, “The Early Bronze Age Anatolian Trade Network and its Role on the Transformation of the Anatolian and Aegean Communities,” in Connecting Cultures: Trade and Interconnections in the Ancient Near East from the Beginning until the End of the Roman Period, eds. Vasıf Şahoğlu, Müge Şevketoğlu, and Yiğit H. Erbil (Ankara: Ankara University Press, 2019), 115–31.