A gift out of Armenia

Take home the tool, not the souvenir.

A potter's rib weighs less than a paperback and it will still be in somebody's hand in ten years. That is the case for one of these over a fridge magnet. The rest of this page is why a printed tool belongs in a country this old at making pots.

The jars came first

In a cave above the village of Areni, in Vayots Dzor, there is a wine press with its fermentation vats and its storage jars standing where somebody left them. Researchers tested the residue in the pottery for malvidin, the pigment that makes red grapes red, and dated the operation to around 4000 BCE, which makes it the oldest known winery in the world¹.

The press is the famous part. The jars are the interesting part. Somebody had to throw or build them at that size, get the wall thickness even enough to hold that much liquid, and fire them without losing the lot. That is a craft problem, and it is the same craft problem as this morning.

A Bronze Age town inside Yerevan

You do not have to leave the city to find the next link. Shengavit is six hectares on a hill by Yerevan Lake, lived in from roughly 3000 to 2500 BC, walled in stone four metres thick, with craft areas where pots were shaped and fired to a black burnished sheen². That pottery is distinctive enough that archaeologists name the whole cultural horizon across the region after the hill.

The words never went out of use

A karas is the enormous clay jar, buried to its shoulder in the floor. A tonir is the clay oven sunk into the ground. Neither is a museum label. Lavash is still stretched over a cushion, slapped onto the inside wall of a tonir and pulled off it about a minute later, and that practice sits on the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage³. Ask for a karas in a Yerevan hardware yard and nobody blinks.

What changed, and what did not

The job of a rib has not changed once. It is a curve, held against wet clay that is turning, so the wall goes where the curve says. For most of those six thousand years the curve was cut out of wood, bone or a dried gourd, which means the potter got the curve the material was willing to give.

Now the curve is drawn first and the material is printed around it. Same hand, same clay, same wheel, and the shape is chosen instead of found. The temperature has not moved either: an Orton cone 6 bends at about 1222 C when the last stretch of the firing climbs at 60 C an hour⁴, and that number is where this studio got its name.

Nothing here is decorated to look Armenian. The continuity is not in the ornament, it is in the reason for making the thing at all: somebody needed a tool that did not exist yet, so it got made here, out of what was to hand.

What it is like to carry

A throwing rib is 118 by 62 mm, four millimetres thick, and 26 grams. A trimming profile is smaller and lighter. They go flat into a suitcase between two shirts, they do not mind pressure or cold, and there is nothing on them to snap off. A caliper gauge folds to 310 mm and 58 grams and travels just as well.

A wheel bat does not. It is 300 mm across and 410 grams and it wants a box of its own. If the gift has to fly, take the ribs and the gauge. Those figures are the drawn ones rather than measurements off a finished batch.

Who it suits

Somebody who already owns a wheel. A tool is a strange present for a person who does not throw, and a good one for a person who does, because every potter has a rib they bought in a shop and have been quietly resenting ever since. Send a photograph of their bench in the thread and the profile can be drawn to suit the pots they actually make.