Mason Ross
Being a student of archaeology, I’ve seen a lot of pottery. It doesn’t matter what region or even time period you focus on, if you study archaeology you will be looking at ceramic vessels and lots of them. Ceramics can be incredibly useful for making chronologies based on vessel shape which allows archaeologists to date sites and stratigraphy. At the same time, once you’ve seen one pot or jar or bowl, you kind of seen them all. You can look in your kitchen cabinets and get a pretty good idea of what ancient people were working with. I can’t say I have ever been baffled by pottery before this trip. During our visits to archaeological museums in Larnaca, Nicosia, and Paphos, one thing became abundantly clear: Bronze Age Cypriot ceramics are weird. They came in shapes I had never seen nor imagined and with decorations that baffled me. There were jugs with three bodies connected to one mouth, large ring-tubes with spouts, and animal-shaped vessels. Some larger vessels were decorated with smaller ceramics sitting on top, a large bowl with small jugs sitting on the rim.
They were undeniably strange, but equally charming. Their shapes are weird to the point of being impractical and borderline non-functional. It seems irrational and absurd to make vessels like this, but at the same time, I want them. I would use it. It would be impractical and ridiculous, but that makes me want them no less. I think these little pots illustrate a concept to keep in mind when examining the past: people are weird. They are weird now, they were weird then, and they’ll be weird in the future. Humans often do irrational things for no good reason at all, and it leaves us guessing at why when in reality there is no satisfying answer. The irregularity with which people apply logic and reason makes it all the harder to untangle. My first question when I saw these vessels was why would someone make that, but the question I left with was why don’t we still make them now.
