Potter's wheel

The wheel may also be used during the process of trimming excess clay from leather-hard dried ware that is stiff but malleable, and for applying incised decoration or rings of colour.

Prior to using a wheel all of these civilizations used techniques such as pinching, coiling, paddling, and shaping to create ceramic forms.

Most early ceramic ware was hand-built using a simple coiling technique in which clay was rolled into long threads that were then pinched and smoothed together to form the body of a vessel.

In the coiling method of construction, all the energy required to form the main part of a piece is supplied indirectly by the hands of the potter.

Early ceramics built by coiling were often placed on mats or large leaves to allow them to be worked more conveniently.

This arrangement allowed the potter to rotate the vessel during construction, rather than walk around it to add coils of clay.

It utilised energy stored in the rotating mass of the heavy stone wheel itself to speed the process.

The process tends to leave rings on the inside of the pot and can be used to create thinner-walled pieces and a wider variety of shapes, including stemmed vessels, so wheel-thrown pottery can be distinguished from handmade.

In the Iron Age, the potter's wheel in common use had a turning platform about one metre (3 feet) over the floor, connected by a long axle to a heavy flywheel at ground level.

This arrangement allowed the potter to keep the turning wheel rotating by kicking the flywheel with the foot, leaving both hands free for manipulating the vessel under construction.

In Japan the potter's wheel first showed by in the Asuka or Sueki period (552–710 CE) where wares were more sophisticated and complicated.

[10] Native Americans have been creating ceramics by hand and in more modern eras started incorporating a wheel into their work.

[11] Historically Native Americans have been using the coiling method to achieve their decorative and functional pieces, and the technology to create an electric wheel did not show up until the arrival of Europeans.

Japanese pottery is thrown oppositely, with the wheel spinning clockwise and the right hand on the interior of the pot.