The Pottery Assemblage: Introduction

The range of pottery types produced by the theater pottery workshop, detailed below in Chapter 11, encompasses almost the entire repertoire of quotidian domestic vessels. This workshop clearly played a major role in supplying the pottery needs of Umayyad Bet She’an and its environs (kūra) and was part of the large ceramic industry that existed in the city at this time (Chapter 8). The petrographic analysis (Chapter 10) confirmed that most of the vessels found in the theater pottery workshop and in the numerous waste accumulations associated with it were indeed produced there, with few exceptions—cooking pots that were