Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5 states that the Yangshao culture probably used potter's wheels; is this correct?

by IntransigentMemorial

The Yangshao potter's wheel theory is on p.388, but I've always heard that the Longshan were the first to use potter's wheels (China not having invented the wheel anyways).

EDIT: I found some more information on Rice's Pottery Analysis, Second Edition: A Sourcebook p.15

There is little evidence for the beginning of the use of the potter's wheel in China. It has been suggested that a low, thick-walled, dish-like vessel commonly found at Yangshao sites between 4800 and 3600 BC may actually have been used as a tournette, a slow or low-speed wheel (Zhou Zhen-xi 1985). The fast or true wheel was apparently used during the Zhou (Chou) period, roughly the first millennium BC (Hobson 1976:2).

Still welcoming more information though!

RioAbajo

Couldn't find much more than you did except this article which looked at the technological aspects of a sample of Yangshao pottery and determined some of it had been "wheel thrown".

Whether that is a true potter's wheel or a foot wheel/dish (a tournette) like Rice suggests is an open question but I would bet on something like the latter.

For example, in this footage of Ethiopian potters (starting 4:30) as a pre-wheel method of throwing pottery. I've also seen variants that are essentially a plate balanced on a rock and turned with a foot. Either way, a tournette would produce pottery that looks similar to truly wheel-thrown pottery and perhaps what the article I linked to above is picking up on in some of the Yangshao pottery. This is especially compelling given that not all the pottery they examined had evidence of being wheel-thrown, since this is a common pattern in pottery produced with tournettes - only a subset of the pottery (usually based on form) is produced with the tournette and other forms are produced without.