Palestine Traditional Pottery: Craft and Commerce

This book stands out as a scholarly testimony to the disappearing craft of traditional pottery making by Palestinian women and men potters. The material it assembles, both textual and pictorial, is based on field research completed in the 1970s by two very different, yet complementary, researchers and authors. For various reasons, this material lay dormant over four decades until it was retrieved and returned to the light of day. The publication of this book followed the death of one of the authors, John Landgraf in 2017 in the U.S. Fortunately, his co-author, Owen Rye in Australia, still had most of the written material in his possession, which was then digitized, arranged, and edited. The graphic material, especially the black and white and beautiful color photographs, taken by the authors, was also gathered and cataloged for reproduction in the book, with outstanding results. The volume invites readers into the two distinct worlds of Palestinian women and men potters at work in the 1970s: the women in their village homes, and the men in their mostly urban workshops. With Palestinian culture under siege, the study presented here aims to record and preserve a key part of that culture. It also memorializes the life and work of John Landgraf, who lived in Jerusalem from 1965 to 1980, and dedicated himself to archaeology, ethnography, and social work.