ABSTRACT
Ceramic arts are generally recognized throughout West Africa as a woman’s art form. Women potters produce a wide range of containers, cooking pots, braziers, and incense burners for domestic use. In some regions, they provide architectural ceramics such as rainspouts and roof finials. Women also produce vessels for ritual contexts, such as burial jars and offering plates. They also make pots in which herbal remedies and other sacred materials are prepared, stored, and protected. Women were probably responsible for most of the ceramic wares that have come from archaeological contexts throughout west Africa, and they may have had a role in creating the terra-cotta figurative sculpture often presumed to be the work of male artists (see Berns).
