Malahini in Greece and Turkey

Now back to a few days ago when we were talking about clay. The next step is very important. When clay dries it is very breakable. It just turns into powder like the clay that they first dug from the ground. In order to become hard the clay must be cooked for a long time at a very hot temperature. This is done in an oven called a kiln. Guy is having a kiln built in his backyard. In the picture you can see John building the kiln.

The kiln is built with three kinds of bricks. The first is a very hard firing brick. These are the yellow ones. They can withstand really high temperatures. The whole inside of the kiln is lined with these. The next is a similar brick that can withstand high temperatures, but it is wedge-shaped and will be put over the whole top of the kiln. The third type is the red brick with a honeycomb center. Because they have air holes they hold the heat in. They are good insulators.

In the picture you see wooden forms on the top forming an arch. These are just supports for the bricks and will be taken out when the bricks are all in place. This is a long oven. The pots are placed in the back of the oven and the fire is made in the front. It takes two days for the pots to fire in the kiln and two days for the kiln to cool down enough so that you can go and get the pots out. Once the pots are fired they are really hard. They can break, sort of like glass, but they will not just fall apart.

By doing this Guy and Phil are learning about the particular clay here in Corinth and the process used by potters to make all of the shards (pieces of pots) that they are finding in the excavations. Clay can be different colors and the clay in Corinth has sort of a yellow color to it. Archaeologists can look at a shard of clay and tell you where it probably is from! In the ancient world pottery was made in certain places and exported (taken different places in ships and sold), so you often find pottery from another location here in Corinth. The clay in Corinth is not the best quality. It was used for cooking pots and that sort of thing, but the more beautiful items were made somewhere else and imported here.
Susie asked how far the dig site is from normal civilization. Good question. It is interesting, but the village of Corinth that we are living in is actually surrounding the archaeological site, so it is about a 5 minutes walking distance from where we stay. I volunteer at the museum and actually am staying in a little house on the archaeological site. The elementary school that I visit is right across the street from the current excavation. Because they have been digging here for over 100 years there is a whole lot of area that was excavated in the past and is now open to visitors and tourists. I have made a map to sort of show you the layout here. It is not accurate and there are lots of details missing, but you can see where we are staying, the village, the dig, the museum and the school. It is all within close walking distance. The dig is called Panagea Field.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 7:50 am and is filed under Archaeology, Greece, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.