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XII/2/2021
INTERDISCIPLINARIA ARCHAEOLOGICA
NATURAL SCIENCES IN ARCHAEOLOGY
homepage: http://www.iansa.eu
Reinventing the Wheel: Perpetual Innovation
in Sinhalese Potter Assemblages
Deborah Winslow
1*
1
School for Advanced Research, 660 Garcia St., Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505, USA
1. Introduction
The earliest appearances of potter’s wheels in
the archaeological record have been documented
comprehensively (eg. Berg, 2020; Evely, 1988; Rice, 1987,
p.7, pp.128–136). The wheel’s advent is associated with
early urbanism, artisanal specialisation, and socioeconomic
diferentiation. Generally, it is seen as a technological step
forward, even when employed for pottery shaping rather
than throwing, complementing rather than replacing hand-
building methods (Crewe and Knappett, 2012, p.178, p.181;
Knappett and van der Leeuw, 2014, pp.76–77). The wheel’s
rotative kinetic energy allowed potters to produce lighter,
more symmetrical, and more standardised wares. Throwing
also improved efciency and facilitated mass production
(Roux, 2003, pp.2–3; 2010, pp.221–222). Therefore, when it
sometimes has been observed that the wheel’s adoption was
followed by its decline or even disappearance, this has posed
a puzzle for analysts.
Archaeologists have proposed diverse solutions to this
puzzle, including: ancient political crises that produced ethnic
diferentiation with parallel technological heterogeneity
(Franken and London, 1995, pp.219–221); depletion of
deposits of clay sufciently plastic and free of intrusions for
wheel throwing (Magrill and Middleton, 2001, p.137); or the
failure of wheel technology to be adopted by a sufciently
large network of potters to achieve redundancy and ensure
cultural transmission (Roux, 2010, p.228; also, Knappett
and van der Leeuw, 2014, pp.82–83). Each solution answers
to a specifc historical context; all accept that wheel-use
decline is a setback in need of explanation. Here, in contrast,
I present an instance in which wheel abandonment produced
economic, social, and technological advancement, increasing
incomes, social status, and productivity. My case concerns
rural potters in Sri Lanka who gave up the wheel for some
types of pottery. Doing so, they set of a cascade of other
changes and thus transformed their industry’s “dynamic
system” (Roux, 2003).
Volume XII ● Issue 2/2021 ● Pages 257–265
*Corresponding author. E-mail: dwinslow@gmail.com
ARTICLE INFO
Article history:
Received: 3
rd
February 2021
Accepted: 16
th
August 2021
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24916/iansa.2021.2.11
Key words:
potter’s wheel
technological change
longitudinal ethnography
dynamic systems
spatio-temporal scale
20
th
& 21
st
centuries
Sri Lanka
ABSTRACT
This paper describes a linked series of potter’s wheel reinventions and abandonments from the
mid-20
th
century through 2013. The wheel is analysed as one element in a complex and dynamic
assemblage of people, resources, technologies, meanings, places, and time. Primary data come from
ethnographic observations and interviews in a Sinhalese Sri Lankan potter community followed
since 1974. As they shifted from one potter’s wheel to another, these potters have altered social and
physical supporting technologies for procuring and preparing clay, acquiring fuel, organising labour,
and marketing pottery. Some, having reached the limits of a wheel’s capabilities and their own bodies,
have abandoned the wheel in favour of moulds and mechanical presses, setting of more cascades of
change. Their experiences help to clarify the adaptive capacities and limitations of both potter’s wheels
and their users. As this story unfolds in often unanticipated ways, it reveals the importance of attending
to spatiotemporal scale. Locally, the wheel highlights the relatively fast-changing afordances and
constraints with which individual potters, households, and communities engage. But the wheel also
brings into focus the slower moving consequences of regional heterogeneities and paths laid down by
national colonial and post-colonial policies decades ago.
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2. Methodology and results: longitudinal ethnography
As a cultural anthropologist, my primary methods are
ethnographic: participant observation, semi-structured
interviewing, life history interviews, and key informant
conversations. I also have consulted the Colonial Record
Ofce Library in London, the National Archives in
Colombo, and private archives to cull historical information
from Administration Reports and other 19
th
and
20
th
century
sources. Fieldwork in Sri Lanka has totalled about 55 months:
longer stays in 1973–1976 (33 months), 1992 (7 months),
2004 (2 months), and 2013 (9 months), with shorter trips of
1 to 6 weeks between.
Here I focus on a potter village that I call Walangama.
Typically, I resided with a Walangama family for months at
a time. On each longer trip, I systematically visited almost
every Walangama household, usually more than once, for
conversations that lasted hours. I updated demographics
and kinship information, learned about social and
economic developments, watched people work, gossiped,
and sometimes collected more specialised information,
such as a one-time network survey and a series of life
history interviews. I have compiled some of these data
into a relational database. Other information, including
that gained by participating in Walangama life, informs
the qualitative aspects of this account. I also have visited
other potter communities, tile factories, and dairies to
create a larger picture. My historical information comes
from interviews with older Walangama residents and
retired ofcials, archival records, and secondary sources.
Together, this information allows me to piece together my
understanding of how the Walangama pottery industry has
changed in the context of other changes locally, regionally,
and nationally: a longitudinal ethnography.
2.1 The early 20
th
century: the collapse of a traditional
subsistence system
Like most Sinhalese villages, Walangama was once quite
small (Denham, 1912, pp.30–33). Between 1881 and 1921,
its population averaged 102 people, all of Potter (
Badahäla
or
Kumbāl
)
caste. But after the advent of malarial control
measures such as DDT, census records and my own counts
show that the population rose quickly: 213 people (1952),
359 people (1964), approximately 600 people (1975), and
around 1000 people in 2013 (Winslow, 2016, p.226 n.3).
That mid-century jump, which doubled the population, was
particularly detrimental to Walangama’s multi-pronged
subsistence strategy.
Walangama people did not always rely primarily on
pottery-making; they preferred farming. They grew rice
on their own felds and gardened dry grains and vegetables
on nearby Crown (government-owned) lands. But pottery
was a necessary fallback. The village’s land base is small
and because it is located in the island’s drought-prone
intermediate climatic zone, rice farming is unreliable;
furthermore, Crown land access was never guaranteed.
Pottery-making, too, had constraints: limited technology,
inadequate workspace, and insufcient markets. Yet, while
singly precarious, together farming, gardening, and potting
once formed a resilient subsistence system. Unfortunately,
by 1948, as Sri Lanka (then, Ceylon) achieved independence
from Great Britain, Walangama was faced with the twin
calamities of a rising population and the loss of their garden
lands to coconut estate planters. Walangama stories of the
1940s were dismal tales of overcrowded houses, crying
children, and chronic food insecurity.
2.2 Post-independence: improving the potter’s wheel
I frst heard those stories in 1974; by then, Walangama’s
situation had improved. The upturn began in July 1949
when one Albert Perera appeared on his bicycle, sent
by the government to start up a “Pottery Demonstration
Centre.” Walangama residents had petitioned their new,
post-Independence Member of Parliament for aid. The MP
had responded not by giving them the agricultural land they
sought but by convincing the Ministry of Industries’ Cottage
Industries Division to include Walangama in its program
to “assist those engaged in village pottery” (Samarasinghe,
1956, p.J4). This program was one of many through which
the new government continued colonial social welfare
policies rooted in Fabian socialism (Jayasuriya, 2001;
Winslow, 2003, pp.53–54). By the time of Mr. Perera’s
arrival, approximately 30 such centres had been established
around the island (van Langenberg, 1951, p.GG19). As the
Acting Director of Industries during the war years later
wrote, “One of the main objects of government intervention
was to
popularise the use of modern wheels to throw and turn
the clay body
” (van Langenberg, 1951, p.GG21, emphasis
added). Local “ofcers-in-charge,” such as Mr. Perera, as
well as visiting inspectors, maintained a log of their activities.
This log reveals that two months after Mr. Perera arrived in
Walangama, he visited the Kurunegala railway station to
“remove pottery wheels” – that is, to collect them to take to
Walangama (Logbook: 8 September 1949).
Walangama’s traditional wheels were “foor wheels” (
bīma
poruva
), similar to southern India’s pivoted block wheels
(Saraswati and Behura, 1966, pp.10–11). The 1948 foor
wheels seem to have been unchanged from those described
for Sinhalese potters decades earlier: “...a circular board
about 2½ feet [76.2 cm] in diameter mounted on a stone pivot
which fts into a larger stone socket embedded in the ground,
the horizontal surface of the wheel itself standing not more
than six inches above the ground” (Coomaraswamy, 1956
[1908], p.219). By 1974, when I frst went to Walangama,
foor wheels were no longer used; but in 2008, I observed
one in another village. I was impressed by its instability.
The potter was able to throw small pots, but the wheel
wobbled on its pivot and to exert sufcient pressure against
enough clay to make larger vessels, she would have needed
an assistant.
The foor wheels were homemade, carved from circular
sections excised from the buttress roots of trees (eg.
Ficus
retusa
) found locally along streams. The round was roughly
shaped with an axe, fnished with fner tools, and surfaced
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with clay. The socket-and-pivot set was typically of granite,
purchased from itinerant stoneworkers or recycled from
older wheels. I also have seen sets made of iron (such as in
Figure 2). The pivot was attached to the wheel’s underside
with a mixture of an adhesive substance like jack tree gum,
and fbrous fller such as human hair or coconut husk fbre.
Potters used the foor wheels to throw of a hump. After
forming the mouth, thick walls, and overall shape, they
detached each pot from the hump, drawing a wire or thin
strip of bamboo through the base high enough to leave
the bottom open. After drying to leather stage, the pot was
paddled (on the outside) against an anvil (on the inside)
to thin the walls and extend them into a rounded bottom.
If a foot was desired, the pot was set upside-down on the
wheel, which was rotated while a snake of clay was attached
Figure 1.
A Sinhalese potter using a foor wheel. Photo: D. Winslow, 2008.
Figure 2.
A view of the underside of the foor wheel (Figure 1) showing the
pivot and socket. Photo: D. Winslow, 2008.
Figure 3.
Buttress root of tree (Ficus retusa), showing scar left by removing
wood for potter’s wheel. Photo: D. Winslow, 2013.
and shaped. This technology is found throughout South Asia
(Saraswati and Behura, 1966). In Sri Lanka, it dates back to
at least the middle of the frst millennium BC (Schenk, 2001,
p.60; Somadeva, 2006, p.295).
Mr. Perera’s “modern” wheels, still used in Walangama,
are hand-turned, single wheels, 65–70 cm in diameter. They
may be hand-carved, but most are made of milled boards
joined underneath with wood or metal straps and shaped
by a carpenter. Because they are mounted at chair height
on a metal pipe set in a ball-bearing race, they are more
comfortable for the potter and sustain faster, longer spins.
They, too, are combined with paddle-and-anvil fnishing.
A potter can work productively solo for all but the largest
pots. A married couple might work alongside each other,
sharing all aspects of potting; they might divide the work,
with the more expert one throwing while the spouse does the
fnal beating; or one might both throw and beat while his or
her spouse is engaged in child care, farming, estate labour, or
other employment. There is no proscription on women using
the wheel and women are among the most skilled potters,
but mothers of infants do more childcare and men do more
farming (Winslow, 1994).
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After their late-1949 introduction, the new wheels were
adopted quickly. The government intended that they be
used in the pottery centre or purchased for home use. But
the potters preferred home workshops and found the price
unafordable, so they soon fgured out how to make them
(Logbook, 11 March 1952). Within four years, the regional
ceramics inspector reported that pottery production had
“increased to 25 percent more than the previous year and
there is every possibility for further increase in production”
(Logbook, 26 February 1953). Indeed, as logbook entries
show, Mr. Perera’s biggest problem soon became marketing,
not production.
Selling pottery became easier after 1950 when the pottery
centre became a “pottery society,” one of many production
and marketing coöperatives established by Sri Lanka’s
socialist government in the early decades after Independence
(Fernando, 1951, p.E35). As coöp members, the potters
could sell directly to the coöp and avoid their previous
practices of selling in weekly markets, by house-to-house
hawking in neighbouring communities, and bartering pots
for rice on bullock cart journeys during harvest season. At
frst, the coöp hoped to purchase a lorry and market pottery
collectively. But despite repeated loan applications, the
regional inspectors of ceramic coöperatives seem not to have
approved this proposal. So, Mr. Perera worked with the coöp
leaders to wholesale the pottery to traders, some from the
village and some from outside, who transported it in rented
lorries throughout the district and beyond. This improved
sales and gave village men (and at least one woman) expertise
in lorry rentals, contracts, and marketing – skills that served
the village well later.
The coöperative faced more challenges: clay and
crowding. Clay is locally abundant along water bodies and
in felds. Traditionally, it was free for the taking because its
Figure 4.
Walangama potter roughing out a potter’s wheel from wood cut
from tree root. Photo: D. Winslow, 1992.
Figure 5.
Walangama potter using paddle-and-anvil technique on half-
dried pot to thin walls and form rounded bottom. Note the fnished pots
behind him. Photo: D. Winslow, 2013.
Figure 6.
Wooden paddles and granite anvils. Photo: D. Winslow, 2013.
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removal lowered felds and improved irrigation water fow.
But after national price supports increased the proftability
of rice farming beginning in 1948 (Weerahewa, 2004, p.8),
farmers became reluctant to grant access. The government
then helped pottery coöperatives purchase clay felds, which
the Walangama coöp did in 1954 (Logbook, November 1954;
Perera, 1960, J56; Samarasinghe, 1956, J84). Potters also
need space enough for workshops, kilns, and areas to shelter
drying pots and store clay, kiln fuel, and fnished wares.
Walangama, hemmed in by coconut estates and with a rising
population, lacked room to expand. Village representatives
again approached their MP and in keeping with the socialist
ethic of the time, he again proved helpful by facilitating
Walangama’s inclusion in a new national Village Expansion
Scheme. In 1955, sixty acres of coconut estate land adjoining
Walangama were commandeered by the government. Fifty
families received one-acre plots and the balance was reserved
for later common uses (Arulpiragasam, 1955, p.A182).
Thus, the robust pottery industry I encountered in 1974 was
not a timeless artisanal tradition but the outcome of over two
decades of innovations and problem solving. The 1970s were
difcult in Sri Lanka; price controls and import substitution
policies produced scarcities, unemployment, and social
unrest (Athukorala and Jayasuriya, 1994, p.33). But because
cooking on three-stone hearths and hauling water in clay
pots remained the rural norm, pottery prices tracked infation
(Winslow, 1996, p.711, Figure 2). Walangama household
incomes, Rs. 400 to 500 a month, were above average (Gavan
and Chandrasekera, 1979, p.19, Table 5). Equally important,
when the national economic environment suddenly shifted,
Walangama’s new pottery-based subsistence system proved
sufciently fexible to adapt, although their wheel did not.
2.3. The open economy and the potter’s wheel’s limits
In 1977, the Sri Lankan electorate voted in a government that
ran on a neoliberal platform of opening the economy and
encouraging foreign investment. Its frst major undertaking
was the Accelerated Mahaweli Development Project, 150 km
to Walangama’s north. It was a massive multi-dam scheme to
harness the Mahaweli River for hydroelectric power, provide
irrigation for agriculture, resettle landless farmers, and
expand rice and dairy farming (Athukorala and Jayasuriya
1994, p.10, n.44). By the early 1990s, the dairy farming
component of this scheme had dramatically increased
production of bufalo milk yogurt or curd (Winslow, 1996,
pp.713–715).
Curd is made and sold in single-use clay pots. Because
they are thrown out after a single use, curd pots (
kiri haTi
,
milk pots) are made more quickly, crudely, and from poorer
quality clay than ordinary pottery (
walan
). Many curd
producers in the Mahaweli area originally came from the
traditional curd producing areas of southern Sri Lanka. Those
producers continued to import the needed pots from their
home suppliers, 300 km away. Traditionally, Walangama
potters did not make curd pots.
But in 1981, a Walangama man wholesaling coöp
pottery in the Mahaweli region noticed the lorry loads of
curd pots arriving from the south coast. He realised that
because Walangama was much closer, he could proftably
underbid the southern suppliers. Leveraging his experience
selling coöp pottery, he secured a contract to supply pots to
a northern dairy farm. He then returned to Walangama to
recruit neighbours and relatives to help him fll the order,
paying them a small stipend to learn this new skill. They
already made a similar pot, the
ätiliya
, a shallow pot with
Figure 7.
Women using ball-bearing wheels. Photo: D. Winslow, 1975.
Figure 8.
Underside of ball-bearing wheel, showing bearing race. Photo:
D. Winslow, 2013.
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a rounded bottom used for cooking curries, so they learned
quickly.
A decade later, in 1992, I found that Walangama potters
were turning out 100,000 curd pots a month while continuing
to produce regular pottery. As dairy farms responded to the
growing middle class’s new taste for curd as a staple food,
the demand for curd pots seemed unending. The potters were
working overtime to take advantage. I heard the tap-tappity
sound of bottoms being beaten into wheel-thrown pots far
into the night and frst thing every morning.
But much as the advent of modern wheels had spotlighted
the foor wheel’s limitations, the curd pots revealed stress
points in the modern wheel system. I timed a Walangama
potter at work. It took her just 10 to 15 seconds to form each
curd pot on her wheel and, once leather-dried, 15 seconds
or so to beat. She grimaced as she compared her work to
making potato chips: identical, relentless, mind-numbing
repetition. It was also physically challenging. 1992 was
the frst time I heard even young potters complain of
painful wrists, shoulders, and backs. The increased need
for clay exacerbated the difculties. Clay was dug with
short-handled hoes, massed into 20 kg balls, and hauled
to workshops in carts pulled by bullocks or mini-tractors.
Water and, sometimes, temper, were then integrated into the
clay by trampling, mixing with bare feet. Clay digging was
physically hard and time-consuming; non-stop trampling
produced swollen and painful knee joints.
The solution to these insupportable stresses turned out to be
replacing them with mechanical means: a “mould machine”
(
achchuwa mäshin
) and a “clay mill” (
mäti
āmbäram
)
.
The
mould machine is a mechanical press with a long, thick screw
that lowers a round metal plate into a hinged metal mould
flled with clay. The screw is then reversed, retracting the
plate from the mould, which is opened to reveal a completely
formed pot. The machines originated in roof tile factories.
Once Walangama potters discovered the machines also could
form pots (Winslow, 2009, pp.265–266), they had local
machine shops adapt them to their needs. The frst mould
machine appeared in Walangama in the late 1990s. Within
a decade, there were over a hundred machines just for curd
pots and handmade curd pots had disappeared as completely
as had the foor wheels a half-century earlier.
The clay mill crushes intrusions and integrates moisture
into clay by drawing it through metal rollers. The frst mill
appeared in Walangama in 2002, an improvised contraption
with a mini-tractor motor, rice mill rollers, and oil drum
radiator. After local engineering shops assumed production,
the mills were standardised and, eventually, electric. The
machines are relatively expensive but some machine owners
now process other potters’ clay for a small fee, so the
technology has spread even to those who continue to make
traditional wheel-thrown pottery.
Curd pots have transformed Walangama’s pottery industry.
In the 1970s, about three-quarters of Walangama households
made wheel-thrown pottery. In 2013, I found that almost as
many (about two-thirds) continued pottery-making but while
some made traditional pottery, others made curd pots, and
some households made both. Hardworking traditional potters
are as fnancially successful and respected as anyone, but
curd pots are considered more easily proftable because they
require less skill and sales are less seasonal. Money is not the
only attraction. Young mothers told me that they preferred
the mould machines because the mess is less than wheel-
throwing. A quick handwash and they are ready to tend to
an infant or toddler. The machines also aforded potters
new options. Younger potters may borrow mould machines
from traders who also supply them clay and kiln fuelwood.
In return, the trader buys the pots at a small discount, thus
securing a steady supply in what remains a producers’ market.
As households become more established fnancially and
children reach school age, they can buy their own machines
and secure their own supplies. The more entrepreneurial may
hire others to help, including non-potters from surrounding
villages because operating mould machines is relatively
unskilled work. In this way, pottery production increasingly
has become more a business and less a stigmatised identity.
The coöp once freed their grandparents from the indignities
of face-to-face selling; now, the mould machines have freed
some from making pottery at all. Whether this will translate
into increased internal stratifcation within Walangama
remains to be seen. So far, it has not, perhaps because the
community is laced with internal kin ties and has a strong
ethic of sharing (Winslow, 2009, pp.260–261).
However, while the machines have solved old problems
they also have created new ones. By 2013, curd pot
Figure 9.
A traditional, wheel-thrown ätiliya vessel. Photo: D. Winslow,
2013.
Figure 10.
A wheel-thrown curd pot, fnished with paddle-and-anvil. Note
the intrusions remaining in the poorly cleaned clay. Photo: D. Winslow,
1992.
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production had expanded to around a million pots a month,
making it increasingly time-consuming to secure supplies.
The bottoms and walls of moulded pots are thicker, an
artefact of the technology, although traders also claim that
dairy farms like the heavier pots because they give the
impression of more product. Table 1 compares the “one litre”
hand-thrown pot (Figure 10) with the “one litre” moulded
pot (Figure 11). The moulded pot required about 40 percent
more clay for a similar volume.
The coöp’s clay feld has not been exhausted but because
the feld’s perimeter was excavated frst, deep gullies now
make accessing the interior difcult. Those who produce
a lot of curd pots fnd it easier to buy clay from farmers.
Heavier pots also require more fuelwood to fre. Walangama
potters fre their pots in shallow pit kilns built around the
pots themselves. There have been some minor modifcations,
such as constructing a permanent brick wall at one kiln end,
but overall the system has changed little despite the changes
in the industry. In the 1970s, they used bio-waste husks
and branches from nearby coconut estates, but as the world
market for coconut oil has declined, estates are being sold
for housing development. The increased competition for the
waste from the few remaining estates allows estate owners
to charge for materials they were once happy to see hauled
away for free. In the early 2000s, the potters supplemented
estate wastes with lumber mill scraps, but then a particle
board factory was built in their region. The mill buys wood
scraps in bulk, undercutting potter access. In 2015, I saw
Walangama producers of both traditional pottery and curd
pots travelling widely in search of kiln fuel.
3. Theories, reasoning, and discussion
In part, Walangama’s potter’s wheel story illustrates the
importance of a dynamic systems approach to understanding
technological change. As Roux explained, “...change is not
seen as process of adaptation and equilibrium inherent in
homeostatic system, but as an emergent property of complex
patterns of interaction in real time” (2003, p.6). Thus, in
Walangama, change emerged and continues to emerge from
perpetual eforts to adapt to changing opportunities and
challenges.
Technologies are rarely seamless, perfected totalities.
Weak points are inevitable and multi-faceted. In Walangama,
dissatisfaction with being easily identifed as low-caste
potters and the challenge of combining wheel use with
daily demands of family life were as much weak points as
were the foor wheel’s wobbles and handcraft’s physical
toil. These stresses conditioned their responses to changing
opportunities and encouraged people to accept (in the case
of ball-bearing wheels) or seek (in the case of curd-pot
machines) alternatives. But those responses introduced or
illuminated new weak points, such as the pressures on clay
and fuel wood. A dynamic system is unlikely ever to reach
a point of fxation or stasis because it always contains within
it the seeds of change (Allen
et al.
, 2010).
Figure 11.
A curd pot made with a mould machine, using clay that has been
processed with a clay mill. Note the ridge left by the mould, the fat bottom,
and the lack of intrusions. Photo: D. Winslow, 2013.
Figure 12.
A mould machine in use. The sitting potter is opening the mould
to remove the pot. The man standing is operating the screw to lower a plate
into the mould and then retract it.
Table 1.
Comparison of weights of thrown and moulded one-litre curd-pots.
Pot typeWt. (grams)Vol. (ml)Base thickness (mm)Outside height (mm)
Hand-thrown6029005.850
Moulded8499506.555
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But while Roux’s dynamic systems framework usefully
highlights bottom-up changes, Walangama’s experience
over the past century shows the importance of extending
analyses beyond the micro-scale. At the meso-scale, we are
reminded that no community exists in isolation. Walangama
is located in the intermediate zone between Sri Lanka’s wet
and dry zones where, because rainfall fuctuates from year
to year, they long relied on pottery-making as a back-up to
agriculture. But there have also been locational advantages.
The region is rich in low-humic gley soils with deep clay
deposits (Panabokke, 1996, Map 1). The coconut estates that
thrived in this zone once provided bio-wastes to fuel kilns.
A lower population density meant that there was eventual
room for expansion. The village lies on a well-travelled road
that connected it to the expanding Mahaweli region to the
north and to the traditional population centres of Kurunegala,
Kandy, and Colombo nearer by.
The subtle importance of these mundane specifcs
becomes clearer when we compare Walangama with two
nearby potter communities, also with good access to clay,
workspace, and, until recently, fuelwood. Kelinawala lies
about seven km from Walangama, a walkable distance.
Kelinawala potters do not make curd pots and their
industry is declining as young people seek other kinds
of work. People there told me that their poor road lacks
a bus service, and outside traders never came their way.
When the Kelinawala pottery society amassed a lorry
load, they would ask kinsmen in the Walangama pottery
society to pass on the message to traders who only
then came to buy, assured that a difcult trip would be
worthwhile. Consequently, Kelinawala never developed
its own traders, as Walangama did. The second example is
Ambagahawewa, also about seven km from Walangama.
Ambagahawewa adjoins a famous old pilgrimage
centre. Over generations, these potters have developed
a reputation for superior wheel-thrown pottery, which
they sell to pilgrims and to wholesalers who come from
throughout the island. They do not eschew change: the
community shares clay mills, some younger potters have
adopted electric wheels, and new pottery styles are added
when there is demand. But given the reliable market for
their traditional pottery, they have stayed with wheel-
throwing. Walangama, Kelinawala, and Ambagahawewa
are not culturally distinct and all have beneftted from
government programs. But locational subtleties have
encouraged diferent trajectories.
Walangama’s history also encourages us to think beyond
the region. After Independence, Sri Lanka continued the
social liberalism that had guided British colonial policy in the
early 20
th
century (Jayasuriya, 2001, p.3). This commitment
brought Walangama, Kelinawala, and Ambagahawewa
their coöperatives, improved potter’s wheels, expansion
land, and clay felds. In 1949, the government even banned
the import of pottery from India to support the domestic
industry (Samarasinghe, 1956, p.J83). That same approach
to protecting the local economy also raised the cost of
vehicles with high import dues, which is probably why the
Walangama coöp was not allowed to buy its own lorry. But
for Walangama, this later turned out to be advantageous.
Village men rented vehicles, developed experience with
contracts, and built contact networks. They were thus well
positioned to expand into curd pots when the opportunity
arose after the economy was liberalised in 1977.
Thus, we can see that the Walangama potters and their
wheels are embedded in a variety of systems that interact
at multiple spatial and temporal scales. In this complex
and dynamic world, we are led to focus on “emergence,
rather than existence” (van der Leeuw, 2020, p.104). The
technology we are trying to describe is always in the process
of becoming.
4. Conclusion
“Any attempt to deal with the morphogenetic properties
of dynamic systems must acknowledge the important role
played by unforeseen events and the fact that actions often
combine to produce phenomena we might defne as the
spontaneous structuring of order” (van der Leeuw, 2020,
p.106).
There was a time when the potters of Walangama wanted
only to be rice farmers. For generations, it was their most
esteemed subsistence activity, promising both food security
and social status. But by the mid-twentieth century, they did
not have, and could not get, enough farm land to support
their growing population. So, they accepted what was
aforded them. As a result, new and unanticipated futures
emerged, diferent ways of being and diferent sorts of
security. Walangama’s potter’s wheel story illustrates how
this technology, perhaps any technology, exists in a dynamic,
historical, inter-scalar web of connections. Looking back,
we can identify the reasons why these potters adopted the
ball-bearing wheel when they had the opportunity. But
it would have been hard to foresee the complex series of
linked developments that emerged, leading eventually to that
wheel’s partial abandonment.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the University
of Amsterdam conference, Archaeological Approaches to the
Study of the Potter’s Wheel (24–27 November, 2020). The
author thanks the conference organisers for including her in
this stimulating event, and the conference participants as well
as IANSA reviewers for their essential feedback. Research
was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF)
Cultural Anthropology Program (1974–1976, 1992); the
American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies (2003–2004); the
University of New Hampshire (2004); the United States-Sri
Lanka Fulbright Commission (2013); and a NSF Long Term
Professional Development leave (2013). Writing was done as
a Senior Scholar at the School for Advanced Research, Santa
Fe, New Mexico. Any opinions, fndings, or conclusions
image/svg+xml
IANSA 2021 ● XII/2 ● 257–265
Deborah Winslow: Reinventing the Wheel: Perpetual Innovation in Sinhalese Potter Assemblages
265
expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily
refect views of funders or other supporters whose generosity
is gratefully acknowledged.
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