Why is there still so much Ancient Greek pottery in pretty good condition when most other objects from that era didn’t survive?
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Ceramics is some of the toughest materials on earth…it doesn’t oxidize. It is incredibly hard:
,”The hardness of alumina ceramics is nearly three times that of stainless steel; silicon carbide is more than four times harder than stainless steel. “
Other things like metal could be melted down and reused. Pottery is very common. There are whole hills of broken discarded pottery. It doesn’t break down quickly so it’s still findable and we can piece it together even if it’s broken.
One thing people haven’t mentioned is when you loot and burn a village or an ancient burial tomb full of riches, people tend to leave the heavy/small pots behind in favor of all the other goodies. An archaeological site might have had everything from Roman, ottoman, or British expeditionary missions take things like statues, jewelry, etc and what’s left for the modern day to find in these abandoned ruins is tons of pots, lamps and crumbling walls
I wonder though, also… if we take OPs question and premise it a different way…
Why don’t we see much in the way then of Bell Beaker beakers, or Chinese pottery of same era, etc? Yes, pure ubiquitousness is a major reason, as top reply says comparing future archaeologists find millions of plastic bottles as opposed to iPhones, but what of plastic bottles compared to clam shell containers?
I.e., in antiquity archaeology would we expect to see, let’s say, a large number of Chinese pottery? On same or similar volume as Greek pottery? Or was it sooooo much more of a volume as to say it would be akin to stumbling into several buried Costcos with plastic bottles remains, versus a scattering of 7-11s with clam shell containers left behind?
There’s also a lot of [Roman glass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_glass?wprov=sfti1) fragments that are usually made into jewellery. The pieces are gorgeous and usually blue or green.
Ever been to a thrift store? Or an antique store? Despite being fragile, pottery is one of the most resilient types of articles humans make. Most metals oxidize, but also historically don’t comprise all that much of what people possessed or used besides weapons and tools (or jewelry). Metal has also historically been reused in future implements. Textiles degrade relatively quickly. Wood rots or gets eaten by bugs. Pottery, if not dropped or mishandled, sticks around. People use a lot of pottery, to store food, drink, makeup, fuel, etc., etc. And ancient civilizations? A lot of them lasted for hundreds if not thousands of years. Modern western civilization (post industrialization) has only been around for about 260 years, and look at all the “pottery” that’s taking up space in curio cabinets, thrift shops, and antique stores.
In summary, it’s partially because as long as it’s not struck and broken, pottery basically lasts forever, and partially because there’s just been so much of it made that even if what’s left is only a small percentage of what was ever made, that’s still kind of a lot.
I just listened to a podcast called Told In Stone about how pottery lasts for ever and is why we find so much of it all over.
In addition to all the mentions of ceramic durability, there’s another pretty significant reason a lot of structures and other large objects didn’t survive. Throughout all the wars that happened throughout history, it was very common to just…destroy things, be it the invading force destroying them or a retreating force destroying them so the invaders couldn’t make use of free supplies. Food stores were often poisoned, too, for the same reason.
A fair amount of the very fancy ones that survive were found in Etruria(now in modern Italy). The Etruscans used underground tombs for burial, many of which have burial goods, including fancy, ornate ceramic pots. These tombs protected the pottery.
It was so prevalent in Etruria that for a long time they were thought to have originated there when in fact they came from Athens.
Thousands of years? More like millions. I can assure you Cockroaches, plastic bottles, and McDonald’s Big Macs will be our pottery to ancient Greece.
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