300px|thumb|Hellenistic [[Amphorae, stacked the way they were probably transported in antiquity, display in the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology]]
[[File:Hirschfeld Workshop Terracotta Krater ca 750-735 bce by alkalisoaps on flickr.png|thumbnail|right|The Hirschfeld Krater, mid-8th century BC, from the late Geometric period, depicting ekphora, the act of carrying a body to its grave. National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.Y. (Accession Number: 14.130.14).]]
Pottery, due to its relative durability, comprises a large part of the archaeological record of ancient Greece. The shards of pots discarded or buried in the 1st millennium BC are still the best guide available to understand the customary life and mind of the ancient Greeks. There were several vessels produced locally for everyday and kitchen use, yet finer pottery from regions such as Attica was imported by other civilizations throughout the Mediterranean, such as the Etruscans in Italy. There were a multitude of specific regional varieties, such as the South Italian ancient Greek pottery.
Throughout these places, various types and shapes of vases were used. Not all were purely utilitarian; large Geometric amphorae were used as grave markers, kraters in Apulia served as tomb offerings and Panathenaic Amphorae seem to have been looked on partly as objets d'art, as were later terracotta figurines. Some were highly decorative and meant for elite consumption and domestic beautification as much as serving a storage or other function, such as the krater with its usual use in diluting wine.
Earlier Greek styles of pottery, called "Aegean" rather than "Ancient Greek", include Minoan pottery, which was very sophisticated by its final stages, Cycladic pottery, Minyan ware and additionally Mycenaean pottery in the Bronze Age, followed by the cultural disruption of the Greek Dark Age. As the culture recovered Sub-Mycenaean pottery finally blended into the Protogeometric style, which begins Ancient Greek pottery proper.
The rise of vase painting saw increasing decoration. Geometric art in Greek pottery was contiguous with the late Dark Age and early Archaic Greece, which saw the rise of the Orientalizing period. The pottery produced in Archaic and Classical Greece included at first black-figure pottery, yet other styles emerged such as red-figure pottery and the white ground technique. Styles such as West Slope Ware were characteristic of the subsequent Hellenistic period, which saw vase painting's decline.
Rediscovery and scholarship
thumb|left| (a fragment of ancient Greek pottery)
The interest in Greek art lagged behind the revival of classical scholarship during the Renaissance and was revived in the academic circle surrounding Nicolas Poussin in Rome in the 1630s. Though modest collections of vases recovered from ancient tombs in Italy were made in the 15th and 16th centuries these were regarded as Etruscan. It is possible that Lorenzo de Medici bought several Attic vases directly from Greece; however the connection between them and the examples excavated in central Italy was not made until much later. Winckelmann's of 1764 first refuted the Etruscan origin of what we now know to be Greek pottery yet Sir William Hamilton's two collections, one lost at sea the other now in the British Museum, were still published as "Etruscan vases"; it would take until 1837 with Stackelberg's to conclusively end the controversy.
thumb|[[Neoclassicism|Neoclassical "Black Basalt" Ware vase by Wedgwood, ]]
Much of the early study of Greek vases took the form of production of albums of the images they depict, however neither D'Hancarville's nor Tischbein's folios record the shapes or attempt to supply a date and are therefore unreliable as an archaeological record. Serious attempts at scholarly study made steady progress over the 19th century starting with the founding of the Instituto di Corrispondenza in Rome in 1828 (later the German Archaeological Institute), followed by Eduard Gerhard's pioneering study (1840 to 1858), the establishment of the journal in 1843 and the Ecole d'Athens 1846. It was Gerhard who first outlined the chronology we now use, namely: Orientalizing (Geometric, Archaic), Black Figure, Red Figure, Polychromatic (Hellenistic).
Finally it was Otto Jahn's 1854 catalogue Vasensammlung of the Pinakothek, Munich, that set the standard for the scientific description of Greek pottery, recording the shapes and inscriptions with a previously unseen fastidiousness. Jahn's study was the standard textbook on the history and chronology of Greek pottery for many years, yet in common with Gerhard he dated the introduction of the red figure technique to a century later than was in fact the case. This error was corrected when the Archaeological Society of Athens undertook the excavation of the Acropolis in 1885 and discovered the so-called "Persian debris" of red figure pots destroyed by Persian invaders in 480 BC. With a more soundly established chronology it was possible for Adolf Furtwängler and his students in the 1880s and 90s to date the strata of his archaeological digs by the nature of the pottery found within them, a method of seriation Flinders Petrie was later to apply to unpainted Egyptian pottery.
Where the 19th century was a period of Greek discovery and the laying out of first principles, the 20th century has been one of consolidation and intellectual industry. Efforts to record and publish the totality of public collections of vases began with the creation of the Corpus vasorum antiquorum under Edmond Pottier and the Beazley archive of John Beazley.
Beazley and others following him have also studied fragments of Greek pottery in institutional collections, and have attributed many painted pieces to individual artists. Scholars have called these fragments disjecta membra (Latin for "scattered parts") and in a number of instances have been able to identify fragments now in different collections that belong to the same vase.
Uses and types
thumb|300px|Diagram of the parts of a typical Athenian vase, in this case a volute krater
The names we use for Greek vase shapes are often a matter of convention rather than historical fact. A few do illustrate their own use or are labeled with their original names, while others are the result of early archaeologists' attempt to reconcile the physical object with a known name from Greek literature—not always successfully.
To understand the relationship between form and function, Greek pottery may be divided into four broad categories, given here with common types:
- storage and transport vessels, including the amphora, pithos, pelike, hydria, pyxis,
- mixing vessels, mainly for symposia or male drinking parties, including the krater, and dinos,
- jugs and cups, several types of kylix also just called cups, kantharos, phiale, skyphos, oinochoe and loutrophoros,
- vases for oils, perfumes and cosmetics, including the large lekythos, and the small aryballos and alabastron.
As well as these utilitarian functions, certain vase shapes were especially associated with rituals, others with athletics and the gymnasium. Not all of their uses are known, but where there is uncertainty scholars make good proximate guesses of what use a piece would have served. Some have a purely ritual function, for example
Some vessels were designed as grave markers. Kraters marked the places of males and amphorae marked those of females. This helped them to survive, and is why some will depict funeral processions. White ground lekythoi contained the oil used as funerary offerings and appear to have been made solely with that object in mind. Many examples have a concealed second cup inside them to give the impression of being full of oil, as such they would have served no other useful gain.
There was an international market for Greek pottery since the 8th century BC, which Athens and Corinth dominated down to the end of the 4th century BC.. In many cases, these pieces of art acted as something that communicated cultural norms to people who encountered them in their everyday lives. Changes in ceramic styles often reflected bigger changes in the Greek world, like new trade routes or changes in city politics. Images on vases showing sports, festivals, and other common activities give us a glimpse into daily life and show how gender roles and proper behavior were shaped and reinforced. According to McNiven, Athenian painters used certain gestures, poses, and body positions to show whether someone was a citizen or an outsider, making pottery a key way to show social boundaries and identity in ancient Greece. Differences in pottery styles from places like Attica, Corinth, and East Greece also show how pottery helped express local community identity.
Clay
The few ways that clay pottery can be damaged is by being broken, being abraded or by coming in contact with fire. The process of making a pot and firing it is fairly simple. The first thing a potter needs is clay. Attica's high-iron clay gave its pots an orange color.