Tournette

The tournette did not emerge to throw pottery. It emerged to finish it—to provide a slow, controlled rotation that allowed potters to smooth, shape, and refine vessels they had already built by hand. The wheel came before throwing; the motion came before the momentum.

Also called the turntable or slow wheel, the tournette consists of a flat circular disc mounted on a central axis, allowing it to rotate on a supportive base. Early examples were made from wood, clay, or stone, and they did not rotate freely—each turn required deliberate effort from the potter. The earliest use of such turntables dates to around 4500-4000 BCE in southern Mesopotamia, in the region that would give rise to Ur, Uruk, and the world's first cities.

The adjacent possible for the tournette required the convergence of pottery production and rotational mechanics. Ceramics had been produced for over 10,000 years by the Chalcolithic period, and potters had long understood that symmetry improved both aesthetics and function. The insight was that rotation could produce symmetry more efficiently than the human eye: if a vessel spins while you work on it, inconsistencies become immediately visible and correctable. The tournette externalized the quality control that potters had previously performed through visual inspection alone.

The technology's use was initially limited and specialized. Archaeological evidence suggests that only a small range of vessels were fashioned on the tournette, produced by a limited number of potters who may have been specialists attached to urban elites. Between 4500 and 4000 BCE, the wheel appeared in Levantine Chalcolithic culture, but the items made were reserved for the social elite—the tournette was a prestige technology before it became a common tool.

The production method the tournette enabled is called wheel-coiling: potters would first build a rough form by hand using coils of clay, then place this 'roughout' on the tournette to thin and shape it during rotation. Excavations at Tel Yarmuth in the Early Bronze Age Levant recovered two basalt tournettes—discs with diameters ranging from 23.5 to 36.8 centimeters—that could achieve approximately 80 revolutions per minute. This speed enhanced the wheel-coiling technique but remained insufficient for true throwing, which requires the angular momentum of a heavier, faster wheel.

A stone potter's wheel found at the Sumerian city of Ur has been dated to approximately 3129 BCE, though fragments of wheel-thrown pottery from even earlier have been recovered in the same region. The technology spread slowly: the Ubaid period (5000-4000 BCE) saw the development of distinctive painted pottery, but true fast-wheel throwing did not emerge until the mid to late third millennium BCE, when the flywheel principle was applied to pottery production.

The transition from tournette to fast wheel represented a fundamental shift in pottery physics. The slow wheel stores no energy—it rotates only while the potter pushes it. The fast wheel, with its heavy stone or clay disc, stores angular momentum that keeps it spinning after the initial kick or push. This stored energy enabled throwing: centering a lump of clay and pulling it upward while the wheel spins, shaping the vessel through continuous rotation rather than intermittent adjustment.

Remarkably, the potter's turntable predates the use of wheels for transportation. The concept of rotational efficiency emerged first for craft production, only later being applied to carts and wagons. The tournette's descendants—modern pottery wheels, record players, lazy Susans—all elaborate on the same principle: that rotation simplifies access to all sides of an object.

By 2026, electric pottery wheels have replaced foot-powered and hand-spun variants in most commercial contexts, but the fundamental technology remains unchanged: a rotating surface that allows the potter to shape clay through the interaction of hand pressure and centrifugal force. The conditions that made the tournette inevitable—the human preference for symmetry, the efficiency of rotational access, the malleability of wet clay—persist wherever ceramics are produced.