Bonfire II: The Return of Pottery Firing Temperatures

In this paper, I reconsider the problem of pottery firing using a large set of comparable data, most of it collected during extensive fieldwork conducted in Africa and Asia. My main purpose is to assess the actual relationships between the firing procedures (structure, fuel, schedule and scale) and some of the firing conditions (time and temperature). Indeed, if different firing procedures result in different firing conditions, the fired pots might display distinct physical characteristics. I will first characterize the various procedures in terms that are both meaningful for anthropologists and likely to influence the thermal profile of a firing. I will then examine the characteristics of the various firing processes in terms of duration, maximum temperature, heating rate and soaking time.