Short answers, pulled from the story.
The three traditional types of pottery are earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain. They are distinguished mainly by firing temperature, with earthenware normally fired below 1,200 degrees Celsius, stoneware around 1,100 to 1,200, and porcelain between 1,200 and 1,400 degrees Celsius. All three can be glazed or unglazed.
As of 2012, the earliest known pottery vessels were found at Xianren Cave in the Jiangxi province of China, dating to 20,000 to 19,000 years before the present. The oldest known ceramic object overall is the Venus of Dolni Vestonice figurine from the Czech Republic, dated to 29,000 to 25,000 BC, though it is not a vessel.
Pottery is a primary source of archaeological data because it is durable and survives for millennia after organic materials decay. Carbon dating reveals an object's age, trace-element analysis by neutron activation identifies the clay source, and fabric analysis of the clay matrix and inclusions reveals how a piece was made and used. Many prehistoric cultures are named after their pottery.
The potter's wheel is a rotating turntable on which a ball of clay is shaped through a process called throwing, a word from the Old English thrawan meaning to twist or turn. The earliest known potter's wheel dates to the middle of the 5th millennium BC and comes from the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture in western Ukraine.
Pottery work exposes workers to crystalline silica dust, which causes the lung disease silicosis, known colloquially as potter's rot. In one study reported in 2022-55 per cent of 106 UK pottery workers had at least some stage of silicosis. Historically, lead used in glazing also caused poisoning called plumbism, first regulated in the UK by the Factories Act Extension Act in 1864.
Stoke-on-Trent is called The Potteries because of its large number of pottery factories, known colloquially as Pot Banks. As early as 1785 around 200 pottery manufacturers there employed 20,000 workers, with Josiah Wedgwood as the dominant leader. Employment later declined sharply, falling from 45,000 in 1975 to 13,000 by 2002.