Pulkau - modern time potter's workshop

A few years ago in the present building stock of a property in the center of the small town Pulkau in Northern Lower Austria a potter’s workshop from the period around 1900 was discovered by the current owner, Gerhard Bauer.

Preserved are the workshop building with glaze mills and a kiln, a turntable, models and small appliances. Furthermore, a building was identified that may had housed the living quarters of the potter’s family and sale- and storage-rooms with high probability. Numerous ceramic pieces, finished- and semi-finished products were found on the property too.

After the first archival research, it was the pottery workshop of the Hehl family, who probably produced ceramics here from about 1870 till the early 1930s.

The importance of this workshop can not be overestimated for (industrial) archaeological research. Though time is still very close (since the workshop’s closing down only about 80 years have been passed), archaeological and economic historical source material to such commercial enterprises are very poor and only in the last ten years have occasionally entered the focus of attention. Studies from an economic history and industrial archeology point of view, which deal with the structuring of such workshops from raw material acquisition through production to distribution of finished products, are still rare.