The vessel might seem an unproblematic category. Vessels are, after all, essential to human survival. They are necessary to contain water, to cook, to store food and goods for future use. Nearly all societies have made and used them; indeed, clay vessels, or their fragments, are one of the principal kinds of archaeological data that give us empirical access into distant worlds of the past. A good proportion of ancient art in museum collections around the world consists of things we would categorize as vessels. Such ubiquity makes vessels central to many kinds of historical investigation. Archaeologists rely on quantitative surveys of durable potsherds to answer questions about chronology, population, trade, and the function of particular spaces, while close attention to the iconography on vessels furnishes important documentary evidence about many aspects of ancient society. Yet as the essays in this volume demonstrate, such approaches by no means exhaust the perspectives that vessels may offer on ancient societies. Many vessels—and assemblages of vessels— were in their own time sites of considerable intellectual power, smart and sophisticated commentaries on the very categories that they embody. On closer examination, the category of the vessel is complex. A vessel is defined not only by its shape, but also by its function, by the presumption that it contains something, though that something may be concealed when the vessel is in use and is not always easy to reconstruct from the archaeological record. But what about a Greek rhyton, a drinking horn with an opening at the bottom, so that liquids poured into one end stream out the other? What about an unused vessel that never held its intended contents; a Maya chocolate pot, broken and then repaired in a way that is no longer watertight; or a thin and fragile gu cup from a Chinese tomb, the form so attenuated that it could never be used? “Is it really a vessel?” is perhaps the least interesting question we can ask about these objects. As Richard Neer argues in his essay in this volume, for us as much as for the ancient Greeks, the value of the category “vessel” might lie precisely in its openness.
