page_title: Ceramic
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Ceramic / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte (Museum of prehistory and early history), Berlin Deutsch: Amphoren, Becher, Deckel, Gefäße und Kette. Keramik, Tierzähne. Kötzschen, Sachsen-Anhalt (Deutschland). Schnurkeramische Kultur ca. 2800-2400/2300 v. Chr. Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, Berlin.
context_page_description: A ceramic is any of the various hard, brittle, heat-resistant and corrosion-resistant materials made by shaping and then firing a nonmetallic mineral, such as clay, at a high temperature. Common examples are earthenware, porcelain, and brick.
  The crystallinity of ceramic materials ranges from highly oriented to semi-crystalline, vitrified, and often completely amorphous. Most often, fired ceramics are either vitrified or semi-vitrified as is the case with earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain. Varying crystallinity and electron composition in the ionic and covalent bonds cause most ceramic materials to be good thermal and electrical insulators. With such a large range of possible options for the composition/structure of a ceramic, the breadth of the subject is vast, and identifiable attributes are difficult to specify for the group as a whole. General properties such as high melting temperature, high hardness, poor conductivity, high moduli of elasticity, chemical resistance and low ductility are the norm, with known exceptions to each of these rules.
context_section_description: Human beings appear to have been making their own ceramics for at least 26,000 years, subjecting clay and silica to intense heat to fuse and form ceramic materials. The earliest found so far were in southern central Europe, and were sculpted figures, not dishes. 
  The earliest known pottery was made by mixing animal products with clay, and baked in kilns at up to 800 °C. While actual pottery fragments have been found up to 19,000 years old, it was not until about ten thousand years later that regular pottery became common. 
  An early people that spread across much of Europe is named after its use of pottery, the Corded Ware culture. These early Indo-European peoples decorated their pottery by wrapping it with rope while still wet. When the ceramics were fired, the rope burned off but left a decorative pattern of complex grooves in the surface.
  The invention of the wheel eventually led to the production of smoother, more even pottery using the wheel-forming technique, like the pottery wheel. 
  Early ceramics were porous, absorbing water easily. It became useful for more items with the discovery of glazing techniques, coating pottery with silicon, bone ash, or other materials that could melt and reform into a glassy surface, making a vessel less pervious to water.
caption: Corded-Ware culture pottery from 2,500 BC.
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