Pottery Disk

A pottery disk is a round disk cut from a broken pot. Because each one starts as a sherd, its two faces are the inner and outer surfaces of the original vessel. Many are drilled through the center to make a flat, washer-like object, but the hole is often off-center or askew, and some disks have two to ten or more holes. Disk and hole diameters both vary widely (Bell 1980).

The maker roughed a sherd out into a circle, rubbed the edge smooth on a stone or other abrasive, and often drilled one or more holes (Bell 1980). A perforated example from Town Creek, North Carolina, is 38.6 mm across and 8.5 mm thick (UNC RLA).

They are often called spindle whorls by comparison with Mexican spindle weights, but many are unbalanced and could not have worked as flywheels (Bell 1980). Multi-holed disks may be strainers: rare Arkansas pottery bottles have a perforated sherd disk built in at the neck, though such disks also turn up on sites where bottles were not used. Large-holed disks from McCurtain County, Oklahoma, may be jar covers, and Bell concludes that their purpose probably varied between groups. The key trait is a round disk cut from a potsherd, with a ground edge and often a drilled hole.

A perforated Town Creek, North Carolina, disk: diameter 38.6 mm; thickness 8.5 mm (n = 1; UNC RLA). Bell (1980) notes wide variation in disk and hole diameter but gives no range.

Eastern North America and the southern Plains: Kentucky, North Carolina and central Oklahoma, where they are characteristic of the Washita River focus (Applegate 2008; Henderson 2008; UNC RLA; Bell 1980). Southwestern examples were not sourced.

Look for a sherd with a ground, rounded edge all the way around; a sherd that merely broke into a roundish shape keeps sharp broken edges. Stone discoidals (chunkey stones) are ground stone, not pottery, and shell disk beads are much smaller and made of shell. On Fort Ancient village sites, pottery disks occur with sherds smoothed along one edge, perhaps as scrapers, and with clay beads (Henderson 2008). Small pottery disks at the Mississippian Morris site, Kentucky, were reported by Rolingson and Schwartz (1966), cited in the Kentucky update.