A Study On Pottery-making Crafts Of The Maqiao Culture And The Liangzhu Culture

This paper aims to analyze and investigate the pottery-making crafts of the pottery shards from Maqiao site by archaeological traces observation methods. With pottery process drawings and descriptions, the author described and summarized the pottery-making crafts of the specimens from many aspects, such as material, forming, trimming, decoration, firing, redecoration and repairing.The discussion of raw materials including its classification, sorting condition and proportion. The main methods to analysis molding process is looking for traces of engagement by visual observation and hang-touching, then discuss trimming modes. Decoration crafts are various and easily recognizable, like jab, characterization, perforation and imprint. Firing process research is very important, this article just observed the superficies, fracture surface and color of these shards, then gave a rough description of the firing atmosphere. Using and repairing traces, such as abrasion, smoked marks, residues, have great significance to the study of artifacts function and restoration of human activities.By summarizing and comparing the ceramic technology of Liangzhu Culture and Maqiao Culture, we can see the continuation between the conical foot of Maqiao Culture and Liangzhu Culture. Many argillous gray potteries of Maqiao Culture are made by wheel methods, just like those similar artifacts of Liangzhu Culture. Maqiao Culture dose contained some cultural facters from Liangzhu culture. However,the artifacts group have a lot different from Liangzhu Culture. The rope figures decorated on cooking utensils are also different from the local tradition represented by Liangzhu culture, it should have other origins. More comparative study on pottery crafts of different archaeological cultures will be very beneficial for exploring the origin of Maqiao culture.