So those who know me, know I am obsessed with the technology behind manufacturing Athenian pottery slips (~7th-3rd centuries BC). An esoteric subject to be sure but one with potential. Let me unpack this for you.We know an astonishing little amount about the organization of pottery workshops in Ancient Athens, despite the fact that the vessels they produced provide the primary visual evidence for ancient Greek culture. What we do know comes from analysis of drawing style on the vessels which has allowed art historians and archaeologists to assign artist attributions and working groups.
A couple of years ago, we published a series of articles on so-called "coral red" decoration (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4754.2008.00413.x/abstract; http://www.mrs.org/f07-abstract-y/), a red colored analog to the more common black colored gloss. We found that the ancient potters were expertly manipulating the chemistry of the clay to produce the red color. Not only this, but there seemed to be more than one way to produce the red slip by altering the clay chemistry. Based on this information we turned our attention to the black gloss slips and asked whether chemical variation in this material might reflect different workshop practices providing another handle to assess artist attributions and workshops.
And thus the Athenian pottery project was born (http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/ancient-greek-pottery-lends-its-secrets-to-future-space-travel/; http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=119082&org=NSF; http://www.livescience.com/13429-d done) Admittedly considerable coverage for not much work done... at least not yet.
For those of you who want to know more, I gave an overview talk on this subject at the March 2011 American Chemical Society meeting. My use of "umm" is profligate, but this presentation gives you a good overview of what we are doing (http://www.softconference.com/ACSchem/sessionDetail.asp?SID=249249).
