Being an amateur geologist is probably not a bad avocation for a glaze chemist.

Patterned markings on some Southwestern pots in the U.S. were used as a way to symbolize color in black-and-white arts.

Since the 1920s, pottery spanning thousands of years has turned up in Lake Biwaka. Archaeologist don’t know why. A robot has photographed a nearly intact ancient urn at the bottom of Japan’s largest freshwater lake, according to Japanese national paper the Asahi Shimbun. Over the last century, a number of pottery pieces representing a huge range in timeline have been recovered from Lake Biwako in central Japan; archaeologists have no idea why.

Kintsugi (Japanese: golden joinery) or Kintsukuroi (Japanese: golden repair) is the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with lacquer resin dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy it speaks to breakage and repair becoming part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.