Abstract
The excavations in the ancient city of Akhetaten at Tell El-Amarna in Egypt produced countless artefacts and fragments of brightly coloured material, known in Egyptology as ‘faience’, in addition to thousands of terracotta moulds for their production. These moulds provide direct evidence for technologies of mechanical reproduction in visual arts of the Late Bronze Age. The experimental recreation of moulds, as well as faience objects created from them, offers a significant advance in understanding perhaps the most crucial issue in faience production: the archetype behind the prototype. Despite the huge number of surviving moulds and faience products, there is no archaeological evidence that shows which material was used for the ‘master’ — the archetype required for the making of a mould. This article discusses faience production and its potential for reconsidering the specific trajectories of archetype to prototype and the distribution of the prototype.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
