AMMAN — Since the beginning of human existence, cooking ware represented an essential category of kitchen tools.

 

Cooking ware refers to a whole category of pottery designed to be placed on the fire to cook food or heat liquids. It is very different from other types of pottery because of its main function.

 

"This distinctive feature means that it differs from other pottery in terms of its shape, the clay used to produce it [the clay recipe] and therefore its external appearance, said archaeologist Laura Vie, who focused on Byzantine archaeology in the Near East, and more specifically on the study of ceramics.

 

There are several main categories of cooking pottery, which are divided into closed and open forms.

 

A closed form is a type of pottery whose opening diameter is smaller than its total height, Vie elaborated, added that on the other hand, an open form is a type of pottery whose opening diameter is larger than or equal to its total height.

 

"Closed forms include cooking pots and kettles, while open forms include casseroles, frying pans and ‘coquettes’ [a French term used to refer to cooking bowls with an inward-bevelled rim and two horizontal handles], said the archaeologist.

 

“One of the characteristic forms of this period is the ‘coquette’ [cooking bowl with a bevelled rim]. This category, which includes forms of varying depths but always with the characteristic morphological features I mentioned above, appeared during the transition between the Roman and Byzantine periods," Vie noted.

 

This is truly a classic form from the Byzantine period, which continued throughout the Umayyad Period and into the Abbasid Period (but began to change during this period, becoming much deeper and tending to close, taking on almost the shape of a small barrel).

 

"Alongside these coquettes, there are always many cooking pots. Cooking pots come from a long tradition of pottery in the Near East. Indeed, they have been found in the region since at least the Persian period," Vie underlined.

 

She added that they have a swollen, globular body and a high neck, with two vertical handles attached from the shoulder to the rim.

 

This pattern continued during the Bataan and Roman periods (with variations in the neck and handles in particular). From the Byzantine period onwards, the body became less globular but still swollen. It could be a little stockier or more pear-shaped, and the neck was less high. But they were still similar.

 

"We can follow this morphological evolution quite clearly. Cooking ware from the Byzantine and Umayyad periods, and even from the Roman Period, is generally recognisable by its external appearance, making it easy to identify even small sherds," Vie said.

 

In general, cooking ware is quite rough to the touch. In the vast majority of cases, cooking pottery is made from clay containing a lot of quartz grains, i.e. sand, Vie said, adding that this sand is not originally present in the clay; it is deliberately added by potters solely for cooking pottery.

 

"This is because it responds to a specific need related to its function. Cooking ware must be able to resist both physical shocks [it must not be too fragile so that it does not break at the slightest impact] and thermal shocks caused by repeated exposure to heat, while allowing heat to spread evenly throughout the cookware so that food is cooked properly," Vie said.

 

One of the solutions found by potters is to add sand to the clay before shaping. This is something that can be seen throughout the Near East, from northern Syria to the Red Sea. Cooking ware often has a reddish colour (sometimes pale, sometimes bright, sometimes dark, brownish).

 

When this is the case, it is because it is made from iron-rich clay and fired in a kiln with oxygen.

 

"The iron particles in the clay, when in contact with oxygen, oxidise during firing and give the pottery a reddish colour. This is what we see in most cases with Byzantine and Umayyad pottery in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine," Vie elaborated, adding that cooking ware produced in Jordan during these periods differs slightly from this.

 

It generally has less ferrous clay, giving it a paler, pinkish or pale orange appearance. This is what makes it possible to distinguish between cooking ware produced locally, in what is now Jordan, and that which comes from elsewhere, in the vast majority of cases from Palestine.