THE AGE OF (BRONZE 
girdles, belts, and fibulae, or “‘fasteners,”’ usually of bronze, 
working on the same principle as our modern safety-pins. 
The types of fibulae differ in various regions and at dif- 
ferent periods and so help materially in identifying the 
age and source of Bronze Age deposits. 
The art of making pottery began, as we have seen, soon 
after the close of the Old Stone Age, perhaps as an out- 
growth of basketry. It underwent steady improvement 
during the Neolithic stage of culture, which probably 
witnessed the first crude beginnings of that most useful 
implement, the potter’s wheel. In making a clay pot by 
hand, the great difficulty was to turn it so that the potter 
—almost always in early times a woman—could shape it 
evenly all around. So someone had the clever idea of 
putting the ball of wet clay into a shallow basket or the 
hollow of a large piece of broken pottery, and then turning 
the latter around gradually as the vessel took shape. 
Later a disk of wood or stone, mounted on a vertical axis, 
replaced the shallow basket. The potter turned this with 
one hand while he molded the clay with the other, until 
it occurred to him to use his foot through the agency of a 
treadle. This left both hands free to shape the bowl, en- 
abling him to produce truer and much more artistic forms. 
It is possible, indeed, that man invented the potter’s 
wheel before the cart. At all events, it appears in ancient 
Egypt far earlier than the cart. 
With the change from making pottery by hand to 
making it on the wheel, men came to replace women as 
potters, a substitution which seems roughly to have co- 
incided with the beginning of the Bronze Age. 
Few classes of objects are of more importance to the 
archeologist than fragments of broken pottery. For clay, 
once baked, is almost indestructible, while different periods 
and countries and peoples all have their own distinctive 
styles of shaping and decorating earthenware vessels. The 
earlier pots and bowls often bore simply the impressions 
of mats, basketry, string, or even the finger-nail, stamped 
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