jan 16, 1000 BC - Terra Cotta Fragment (Lapita)

Description:

Lapita pottery was shaped by hand, and perhaps using a paddle-and-anvil technique to thin the walls, but without the aid of a potter’s wheel. It is low-fire earthenware (no evidence of Lapita kilns have been found). This means that the dry clay pots would likely have been placed in open fires to harden—the descendants of the Lapita people in Fiji and other areas still make pottery in this way.
-There is some geographical variation in the shapes and sizes of the pottery but most were simple bowls, some had pedestal feet, and others were flat-bottomed vessels.
-The makers of the Lapita pottery blended clay with a particular type of sand. The sand was needed as a temper to make the vessels more durable during firing
-Hunt showed that a large number of the pot sherds found there had been made from materials brought from other places, indicating that either the raw materials or perhaps the pots themselves had been imported. This reveals that the Lapita people had the means and the need to travel and trade across significant ocean stretches—their “sea of islands