Materials · c. 4,500 BCE

Potter's wheel

A rotating wheel helps potters thin and shape vessels built from clay coils.

In the southern Levant, potters used rotating wheels to thin and shape coil-built bowls during roughly 4500-4000 BCE. Northern Mesopotamian examples follow in the early fourth millennium BCE. These early wheel-coiling methods differ from throwing a vessel from a single lump of clay.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia Source

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 1

Pottery 18k BCE

What it led to 1

Porcelain 100

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

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