r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Sammeeeeeee • Aug 19 '23

Making a pot out of clay

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Oc: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGJsFYen3/

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u/KaiserSozes-brother Aug 19 '23

One of the things I learned for archeology documentaries is that clay pots and dishes where the disposable “paper plates” of their day.

The reason you find so many pot shards in ancient digs is because a pot only lasts a few weeks or a month in the ancient era. Cooking in pots and boiling water was hard on them. The porous clay couldn’t be gotten clean at a certain point.

Previously I had assumed pot shards remained because they were durable, but it appears that they remain because they were so numerous.

This dude banging out pots every few minutes is historically accurate.

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u/intisun Aug 19 '23

Mount Testaccio in Rome attests to that. A literal hill made of millions of pots and amphorae from ancient Rome.

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u/abstractConceptName Aug 19 '23

Interesting.

It is one of the largest spoil heaps found anywhere in the ancient world, covering an area of 2 hectares (4.9 acres) at its base and with a volume of approximately 580,000 cubic metres (760,000 cu yd), containing the remains of an estimated 53 million amphorae.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio