ABSTRACT
In the 1930s Petrie described some of the decorated pottery he discovered in the course of his excavations at Gaza (Tell el-’Ajjul) as ‘the finest ancient fabric known’ (Petrie, 1931: 10). He gave to it a variety of names – ‘Chocolate and White’, ‘Cream and Chocolate’, and ‘Chocolate brown on White’ (Petrie, 1932:11; 1933: 12; 1934: 13). A few years later Olga Tufnell recognised the fabric from the Fosse Temple at Lachish and called it ‘Chocolate on White’ (Tufnell, Inge and Harding, 1940: 80), a name which has remained in fairly general use to describe the fabric, although Stewart (1949; 1974: 26) used one of Petrie’s earlier terms and continued to refer to the pottery as ‘Chocolate and White’. In spite of its attraction the fabric received little attention until Ruth Amiran lumped the painted and plain burnished white slip wares together under the general name of ‘Chocolate-on-White Ware’ (Amiran, 1970: 158–59). Petrie appears to have suggested the same association (1932: Pl. XLII). Elezier Oren discussed the various individual shapes and decorations of the Beth-shan examples of the style in his publication of the northern cemetery from that site (Oren, 1973: 68–85).
