A gift out of Armenia

Pottery is older than farming. This is the newest pot in that line.

A vessel is a strange thing to put in a suitcase and a very good thing to give. It will be in use every day for years, it does not shatter the way a glazed pot does, and the idea behind it is about twenty thousand years old.

Older than farming

The oldest pottery anybody has dated came out of Xianrendong Cave in southern China. The sherds sit at 20,000 to 19,000 calendar years before the present, and they were made by mobile foragers, more than ten thousand years before agriculture existed anywhere¹.

That order matters. People did not learn to farm and then invent a container to keep the harvest in. They made containers first, while still hunting, because a pot is the first object whose entire job is to hold something now so that it still exists later. Every vessel since is a version of that one idea.

The Armenian version is enormous and it lives in the floor

A karas is the great clay jar, and it is not a decorative shape. It is a working piece of infrastructure set down into the ground. In a cave above the village of Areni, in Vayots Dzor, a wine press was found with its fermentation vats and its storage jars still in place, and the residue in that pottery dated the operation to around 4000 BCE, the oldest known winery in the world².

The press is what gets the headlines. The jars are the harder problem. Somebody had to build them at that size, keep the wall even enough to hold that much liquid, and fire them without losing the batch. And then set them into the floor, where a jar is out of the way of the sun and the wind. It is the cheapest cellar there has ever been.

A pot inside a pot

That is what a self-watering vessel is. Two walls with water between them, standing 9 mm apart, and a wick that lifts the water up into the medium at whatever rate capillarity chooses. The karas did the same trick with the earth as its outer wall.

The difference is that the buffer is now part of the object, which is why it can sit on a shelf in a flat in a city rather than in the floor of a cellar. The instinct is unchanged. Put a reserve around the thing you want to keep alive, and then stop having to think about it every day.

What changed, and what did not

What has not changed is the reason: a living thing, a wall, and a reserve of water. What has changed is that the wall thickness, the rib and the gap are drawn before they exist, and redrawn when the first one is wrong.

There is one more difference and it is the practical one. A kiln batch wants to be a batch, and a mould wants to be used more than once. A printer has no opinion about making a single vessel at 137 mm because that happens to be the diameter your plant is in. That is the whole reason this line exists, and it is a thing a potter at Areni would have wanted and could not have.

Nothing here is ornamented to look Armenian. The continuity is in the problem being solved, not in a pattern applied to the outside of it.

What it is like to carry

A table vessel is 130 mm across, 148 mm tall and 190 grams empty. It is PETG, so it does not chip and it does not shatter, which is more than can be said for the ceramic pot anybody else would have bought. It is also hollow, so it travels with socks in it and costs you nothing.

The floor vessel is luggage in its own right at 240 mm and 910 grams. If the gift is flying, take a table vessel or a shelf trough. Those figures are the drawn ones rather than measurements off a finished pot.

Who it suits

Somebody who travels, and comes home to a plant that has either drowned or dried. A reservoir sized in days is a present aimed squarely at that problem. If you can get a photograph of the plant and the diameter of the pot it is standing in, the vessel can be drawn for a windowsill on the other side of the world.