Chapter 8

Ceramic Raw Materials

8.1 Introduction

This chapter is mostly about pottery. Pottery is only one of the large number of
products known as ceramics. Other ceramics are covered briefly. Although pottery
is composed of predominantly crystalline phases, glass (including glaze) is not.
Glasses (including obsidian) are formed from the solidification of molten silicate –
solidification that took place too rapidly for minerals to crystallize. Terracottas are
thick, coarse, porous wares normally fired well below 900°C. Porcelain is a ternary
mixture of clay, quartz, and feldspar. The latter acts as a flux that aids in the devel-
opment of a glassy phase in the fired product.
Ceramic production has always been an empirical art. This is especially true
of pottery making. The lack of any scientific basis in ancient pottery construction
within a society led to a slow, trial-and-error process that often lasted for at least
decades, if not much longer. Choosing raw materials was one of the most important
aspects. The preparation of these materials before firing also had significant effects
on the final product. However, at the heart of ceramic production is a pyrotechnol-
ogy – how the raw materials change during firing.
The raw materials for pottery making can be divided into three categories: (1)
clays, the dominant material, (2) temper (additives) used to control physical proper-
ties of the ceramic, and (3) minerals to impart a glaze, a color, or other desirable
property.
Low-grade clays, those that do not make good pottery without refining or mix-
ing, are available almost everywhere, so the manufacture of building brick and tile
did not require much consideration of raw materials. Clays have two important
functions in the production of ceramics. First, their plasticity is basic to shaping
the material in its green (unfired) state. Second, clays fuse over a temperature
range without the body losing its shape. The modern ceramics industry has ben-
efited from a solid scientific foundation, but the production of ancient ceramics
discussed in this book was an empirical art, practiced with a limited array of raw
materials.

G. Rapp, Archaeomineralogy, 2nd ed., Natural Science in Archaeology, 183

DOI 10.1007/978-3-540-78594-1_8, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009
184 8 Ceramic Raw Materials

8.2 Clays

The term clay has three meanings: (1) a rock term describing a natural, earthy,
fine-grained material that develops plasticity when mixed with a limited amount of
water, (2) a particle-size term for the smallest particles (less than 2 µm), and (3) the
name of a group of sheetlike silicate minerals. Some clays have little or no plastic-
ity, e.g., the so-called “flint clay,” but, for the purpose of this book, the plasticity
criteria will hold.
Clay minerals form as a product of weathering, as a product of pedogenesis,
and as a deposited sediment. With rare exceptions, such as some kaolinite deposits,
natural clay is not a single mineral but rather an aggregate of minerals and colloidal
substances. All natural clays contain both non-clay minerals and material larger
than clay sizes. The clay minerals are always exceedingly fine-grained, and X-ray
diffraction (XRD) analyses are necessary to identify them. Some can be observed
only with an electron microscope at magnifications greater than 5000. Clay mineral
shapes may be sheetlike, lathlike, fiberlike, or hollow-tube shaped.
Common clays are found everywhere but high-grade clays, those that make
good pottery without refining or mixing, are more restricted. China clays (pure
kaolin) occur only in Britain, France, the Czech Republic, southern United States,
and China.
One of the earliest uses of clay may be the famous “Venus” female figurines dat-
ing from about 32,000 BP (Zimmerman and Huxtable 1971). By the late Neolithic,
other items made of clay included toys, models, loom weights, spindle whorls, and
stamped items used to record economic transactions (Fig. 8.1). Since ancient times

Fig. 8.1 Clay head of a

figurine, Iron Age, Tel
Michal, Israel