General Information

Notion Gritty Cook Ware represents the array of cooking vessels of the site’s Hellenistic-era residents. Shapes consist of a wide variety of vessel for cooking and food preparation: cooking jugs, stew pots, casseroles, baking dishes, mortars, and lids.

This ware has been defined on the basis of excavations of a single large Late Hellenistic house, so these particular forms represent a specific moment in the history of Notion. However, a surface survey of the full site and its immediate environs, carried out from 2014-2019, recovered ceramics from the Iron Age through the late Roman period that included many vessels whose ware description conforms with that of Notion Orange Gritty Cook Ware. That ware, named Pink-Orange Super-Gritty, is characterized by a very micaceous pink-orange fabric with many different colored inclusions of varying sizes.

The ubiquity of vessels of this ware at Notion over time suggest that it was manufactured nearby.

The fabric is micaceous and very gritty with frequent, large white inclusions, and smaller gray, yellow, and brown inclusions. This ware is often a bright orange or reddish yellow in color (5YR 65/6 -- 5YR 7/8), although it can have a more reddish hue. Vessels tend to be fully fired and breaks are platey/laminated.