Potter's wheel

A horizontal rotating wheel to assist a potter in shaping clay into vessels. Actual examples do not survive, so that it is not possible to document the different varieties of wheel, kick-wheel, treadle-operated or power-driven. The evidence of the pottery is usually conclusive. Some sort of turntable, known as a tournette or slow wheel, was first used to true up handmade pot, particularly its lip. By the Uruk phase in Mesopotamia, c3400BC, the fast wheel was already in use. It spread slowly, reaching Europe with the Minoans c2400BC, and Britain in the 1st century BC.