The Japanese potter Yagi Kazuo was once asked to name the essence of ceramics. Was it the wheel, the traditional tool of the potter? ‘ No, it's not the wheel’, Yagi replied. ‘ It's that feeling you get when you take soft clay and squish it between your fingers' (Adamson 2007: 57–58). The plasticity of clay and the way that it is directly formed by the body set clay apart from other materials. This relationship between the physical qualities of clay and the corporeal nature of potting has often become lost among traditional archaeological concerns with ceramics such as typology, style and function. Yet given that in the European Bronze Age the vast majority of ceramics throughout the continent were handmade, the interrelationship between the particular qualities of clay and the ways in which clay could be worked by potters is critical to understanding the potential of clay for creativity in material culture.

In this essay, I want to explore the dialogue between hands and clay in the making of objects. I want to look at creativity in terms of the role of the body in the forming of things – as a literal act of creation. This necessitates an understanding of craft – the process of making by and – and its outcome, the handmade object (Adamson 2007). It also requires an understanding of creativity as an embodied process in which thinking takes place through the whole body, not only in the mind. In other words, thinking takes place through doing. Such a process is particularly important in potting because of the way the creation of objects takes place through the relationship between the body and materials; creativity is a matter of the ‘thinking hand’ (Pallasmaa 2009). My case study focuses upon Early and Middle Bronze Age miniatures and figurines created through a diverse range of techniques for modelling in clay from throughout the Carpathian Basin.