General Information

Early Islamic Negev Highlands Crude Handmade Ware comprises the second most common group of ceramics found in Early Islamic Yotvata (after Mahesh Ware). It is represented by a wide range of shapes, including bowls, basins, cooking pots and possibly also jars. The fabric is coarse and low-fired, as seen by a characteristic grey, dark grey, or black core, with pinkish, reddish, yellowish, greenish, or brown-coloured margins. Small white inclusions are typical and voids from organic tempers are evident in some cases.

A subset of shapes, primarily bowls and jugs/small jars, were decorated with simple brown or reddish-brown stripes painted either directly on the clay or over a cream-coloured slip. Painted motifs include intersecting, attached, or parallel straight or curved stripes, and sometimes dots, sometimes creating a more or less symmetrical pattern such as a herringbone or a triangle with attached loops. 

Petrographic analysis of some sherds of Early Islamic Crude Handmade Ware from Yotvata reveals that potters sometimes added grog to the clay recipe, and also frequently added chaff to the recipe for cooking pots.

Examination of 17 vessel fragments, all apparently closed vessels, revealed clearly defined textile impressions, most on the interior but also a couple on the vessel exterior. It seems that the vessels were made by wrapping clay coils around a textile bag full of wet sand, which provided the rounded shape of the vessels. This technique is well known from later Middle Eastern handmade vessels dating to the Crusader/Ayyubid- to Ottoman-periods (twelfth–nineteenth centuries) (Avissar and Stern 2005, 113; Gabrieli 2015, 138, fig. 8a; Biezeveld and Düring 2020, 210–12, fig. 13).

Early Islamic Negev Highlands Crude Handmade Ware should be distinguished from the broad category of ‘Negebite’ Ware that was coined by Yohanan Aharoni in the late 1950s. That term, which has become widely used, refers to a family of crude handmade pottery found in nearly all Iron Age (first millennium BCE) sites in the Negev Highlands and the ‘Arabah Valley (Meshel 2002, 284; Iron Age Negebite Handmade Ware). In fact crude handmade vessels appear in the arid regions of the southern Levant across an enormous span of time, from the Early Bronze Age I and II, Middle Bronze Age I, Late Bronze and Iron Age, and then again in the Byzantine and Islamic periods (Haiman and Goren 1992, 143). The vessels found in Early Islamic contexts in the Negev and ‘Arabah regions used to be linked with this so-called ‘Negebite’ Ware, despite differences in form and function. By distinguishing the Early Islamic group from other crude handmade wares found in this region, it is now possible to appreciate how Early Islamic Crude Handmade Ware sits at the beginning of a long sequence of handmade pottery production in the Islamic Levant, a sequence that isbegan in the early stage of Muslim rule and lasted until the twentieth century.*

*This description is based on that found in Taxel et al. 2022.

The fabric is coarse and low-fired, as seen by a characteristic grey, dark grey, or black core, with pinkish, reddish, yellowish, greenish, or brown-coloured margins. Small white inclusions are typical and voids from organic tempers are evident in some cases.

Negebite ware