What was the importance of Pottery in Indus Civilization?

A large variety of pottery, both plain and decorated, has been found. All the ornamental wares are coated with an opaque red slip upon which designs were made with thick black pigment. The clay, obtained from the local riverbeds, was tempered with sand and contains mica or line particles. The pottery is surprisingly identical at Harappa and other sites.

However, recent advances in Harappan phase ceramic studies are the progress in defining regional styles of ceramic production. The studies, it is postulated, will make the phrase “typical Harappan ceramics” a meaningless phrase, as there is considerable variation in the ceramics produced at the major urban centres as well as that being produced in the regional centres and rural sites.

Harappan wares were shaped on a potter’s wheel. The potters’ wheels, being made of wood, have not survived. The kilns in which the pots were baked have been unearthed. These kilns, 2.1 m in diameter, are round with a perforated floor on which the vessels were laid. There was a space below this floor in which the wood fire was kindled. The smoke was carried away through a hole in the domed roof.

The heating was skillfully controlled as most of the pottery was carefully fired, though a few were overbaked. The slip used was red ochre which came from Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. Once the vessel was shaped on the wheels, the ochre was painted quickly over it. Then the designs were painted on this red surface with a brush in black. The black colour was derived from magniferous haematite. The designs include a series of intersecting circles (a pattern exclusively found in Indus Culture), tree placed in metopes, motif resembling a large comb, chessboard pattern, triangles, solar device, etc.

Figures of animals, birds, snake or fish occur rarely. Animals are shown with grass and birds on trees. No human figure is depicted on the pottery from Mohenjodaro but a few pottery pieces discovered from Harappa portray a man and a child. Matching as a means of distinguishing one motif from another was very popular.

The thick red slip of ochre also sealed the pores of the pottery and prevented undue evaporation. The jars used for keeping water were water-proof inside with a preparation containing bituminous basis. Small vessels were painted in polychromes, red, black, green and very rarely yellow. These colours were applied after the vessel was baked. Polychrome pottery is rare and confined to small. White was used both as an independent colour and also as a slip.

Indus pottery has plain bases. The few ring bases discovered are on handmade pottery, which were baked at home. Since most of the floors were made of hard earth, the vessels with a rounded or pointed base should not have been suitable. Large jars were used as larders for grains; other jars, partially buried under the floor, served as receptacles for family valuables and ornaments. Large vessels were also used as cesspits.

Drain pipes of pottery were used; shreds of broken pottery were laid down as a porous layer beneath the floors of the bathrooms. Some of the broken jars were probably used on water wheels. Hundreds of badly fired and damaged pottery pieces found near the kilns were throw-outs. One jar shaped like a ram was probably used as an inkwell. Oval vessels, tripod jars and the ones bearing figures of animals in relief are strangely missing.

Clay traps were used for catching mice and in the pottery cage chirping birds were kept as pets. Drain pipes, wheels, spindles whorls, bracelets, etc. were made of clay. Toys and other household articles of clay were in plenty.

At Mohenjodaro, in the late levels, the pottery workshops were set up inside the habitation areas indicating the changing activity pattern in different chronological phases. Similar was the case with Harappa (Mound F), but recently a series of kilns on the Mound E have revealed the presence of pottery workshops indicating long term hereditary craft activities in a segregated area of the city. This suggests that while some ceramic production may have shifted to different areas of the city, other workshops remained in the same locality for hundreds of years.

On the basis of stratigraphical analysis at Lai Shah (c. third quarter of the 3rd millennium BC) where a series of six pottery firing kilns with perforated grate supported by a central pillar was excavated by Pracchia (1985) it was suggested that the kilns were not used at the same time, and were probably used seasonally for a period of 10-15 years.