By Akiva Sanders

At sites dating from the 7th millennium BCE onward, ceramics form the most ubiquitous category of artifact recovered at excavations in the Near East. Anyone who has participated in an excavation can tell you that pottery finds often reach the point that each sherd becomes totally unremarkable.

But upon cleaning these piles of unearthed ceramics an observer may sometimes be taken aback by the discovery of fingerprint, left behind by the hands of the individual who originally formed the pot. This opens an unexpected channel of corporeal communication to a long-vanished individual. Although the vast majority of these fingerprints are too fragmentary to study individual potters, it has recently been shown thata differences in distributions of ridge density among these archaeological fingerprints can reveal differences in gender among the producers of ceramics.

A reanalysis of ceramics from Early Bronze Age (EBA) Hama, Syria, in the National Museum of Denmark by an international team from Denmark, France, Italy, and the United States presents a unique opportunity to study what ancient fingerprints can tell us about the gender organization of ceramic industries. This follows a pilot study on the topic using Late Chalcolithic (LC) to Middle Bronze Age (MBA) ceramics from Tell Leilan, Syria.

The ceramic assemblage from Hama comes from the same periods as the Tell Leilan ceramics, but offers the perspective of a smaller site throughout these periods, in a neighboring region (Inland Western Syria), as well as a larger sample size (429 fingerprints). The Hama sample also includes many more complete vessels, a larger variety of objects, including figurines and miniature vessels, and an opportunity for collaboration with other scholars.

Map showing the location of Hama and Tell Leilan.

The most notable result observed from Tell Leilan was the change in the demographic composition of potters involved in forming and finishing ceramics during the period of rapid changes in social structure and day-to-day interaction that accompanied the site’s urbanization, ca. 2600 BCE. In the pre-urban phases of the site’s occupation (mid-4th to mid-3rd millennium BCE), both adult men and women participated in the forming of all types of ceramics. But during subsequent urban phases of occupation (ca. 2600-1726 BCE, including a ca. 150 year hiatus), all types of ceramics were formed by adult men only. This shift was interpreted as evidence for stricter division of labor by gender, family, and social class concurrent with the emergence of urbanism, state-type central institutions, and mass society.

Looking for fingerprints on Hama zoomorphic figurines. All figures courtesy A. Sanders.

Fingerprint found!

This was the primary result that we were looking to complement using the Hama ceramic assemblage, a site that appears never to have been truly urban in a neighboring region with a different set of ceramic types. However, Hama does seem to have been an important pilgrimage site and possibly a significant trading center within the social, economic, and ritual spheres of urban Ebla by the EB IV through the MBA (ca. 2500-1650 BCE).

In the earlier phases at Hama, as at Tell Leilan, both adult males and females seem to have been involved in the process of forming and finishing all different types of ceramics. With ceramics from Hama Period J, on the other hand, corresponding to the EB IV palatial phases of nearby Ebla in the mid-3rd millennium, forming and finishing ceramics seems to have become the exclusive purview of males, as at contemporary levels at Tell Leilan.

But at Hama there is also evidence that the production process increasingly included children from the age of about eight, a result not observed at Tell Leilan. These findings confirm the disappearance of women from aspects of the ceramic production process in the mid-3rd millennium and are correlated to increasing professionalization of the industry, as apprenticeship from a young age became more important. This type of apprenticeship among same-gender children of professionals can also be seen in texts of the contemporary Ur III period in Southern Mesopotamia. Participation of children seems to be the most marked in production of goblets and cups, whose great quantity and broad distribution across Western Syria has been interpreted as part of the rise in banqueting events that buttressed the power of emerging palace households. A similar pattern of the child participation at Hama in pottery production continues into the following MBA period.

A fingerprint found on a figurine.

A fingerprint found on a Hama Period J goblet.

Fingerprints on a jar.

The mostly zoomorphic Middle Bronze Age figurines from Hama levels J and H present an interesting complement to the ceramics dating from those periods. They seem to have been produced through collaboration between adult males (and possibly also females) and children, peaking around late childhood. Figurine production may represent a small-scale endeavor, employed primarily for the enjoyment of the figurines’ own producers, or it may have been used in the early stages of potter’s apprenticeship, transforming the practice of child’s play into training for the system of large-scale ceramic production.

The evidence of fingerprints from Hama illustrates the impact the dramatic social transformations of the mid-3rd millennium had on the lives of men, women, and children alike in Inland Western Syria.

Akiva Sanders is a graduate student at the University of Chicago.

For Further Reading:

K. Branigan, Y. Papadatos, and D. Wynn. “Fingerprints on Early Minoan Pottery: a Pilot Study.” Annual of the British School at Athens 97 (2002): 49-53.

A. Sanders, “Fingerprints, Sex, State, and the Organization of the Tell Leilan Ceramic Industry.” Journal of Archaeological Science 57 (2015): 223-238.

R.P. Wright, “Crafting social identity in Ur III southern Mesopotamia.” Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 8.1 (1998): 57-69.