People around the world have made things using earth and fire for thousands of years. They discovered that clay forms left in or near a hot fire for long periods of time become stronger. Click to see a Chinese jar that is four and a half thousand years old. Fired clay forms are called ceramics.

Some ceramic pieces are rejected by their makers as not good enough to fire. When potters judge that their pots are not very good they squeeze them back into a ball of clay and try again.

Many ceramic pieces have been used and accidentally broken through the years.

Other ceramic pieces have been discarded because the people who owned them didn’t care about them. Some very old ceramic pieces still exist today because people treasured them and passed them on from generation to generation. This sugar bowl and creamer, from Limoges, France, have been passed down from grandmother, to mother, to daughter.

People have discovered very old ceramic pieces in archeological digs like this one in Cyprus ...

... or in the sunken ships (scroll down for the story of an 18th Century Swedish ship wreck carrying Chinese porcelain).

Today people value ceramic work for many different reasons, for example, because they are rare, or functional, or unusual. Some pieces are so interesting and special that they are prized as works of art -- even some that were not considered to be art by the people who made them. People of different cultures and times have different ideas about what makes a good piece of ceramic art.

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