Mug from the Late Neolithic Period


QUALITATIVE
STYLE
What does it look like?

The style of a cofee mug depends on the type of mug you are looking at. Commonly, a mug is a type of cup that you use to drink hot beverages, such as coffee, tea or hot chocolate. According to its definition, they must hold larger amounts of fluid than other types of cup, for example a champagne cup. Usually they are deigned to hold 350 ml of liquid, that is double a regular cup of tea. Anciently, mugs were carved in wood or bone or shaped of clay. Modern ones are made of ceramic materials such as bone china, porcelain or stoneware. Others are made of strengthened glass such as Pyrex. The diversity is such that there are mugs in plastic, steel and metal. Oftenly coffee mugs carry designs and techniques suck as silk screen printing or decals that are used as decorations. They are fired onto the mug to guarantee their permanence.

Other definitions say that a mug is a ceramic cup deeper than other cups and the types of handles depend on the design. Mugs are often sold alone or in sets of 6 to 12.

The oldest drinking vessels found by archeologists were made of bones and they usually didn´t have a handle, so they are not considered as mugs. The first mugs appeared in the Neolithic Stone Age, when pottery was developed in China and Japan around 10000 BCE. The first pottery was shaped by hands and was facilitated by the invention of the potter´s wheel. It was easy to add a handle to a cup in the process. An advanced, decorated mug from 4000- 5000 BCE, was found in Greece. However, these mugs had very thick walls that made them unfit for the mouth. The walls were thinned with development of metalworking techniques. Metal mugs were produced from bronze, silver gold and even lead, starting at 2000 BCE. They were hard to use with hot drinks. Wooden mugs were then produced, but most of them could not be preserved. The first coffee shop appeared in 1475 in Constantinople and mugs were made out of wood. The invention of porcelain brought a new era of thin- walled mugs suitable for hot and cold liquids, and are the ones we enjoy today.

Nowadays, mugs design aims at thermal insulation. The thick walls of a mug, insulate the beverage to prevent it from cooling or warming quickly. The bottom is often not flat to reduce the thermal contact with the surface on which a mug is placed.

As the mug is multifunctional and is often used as an object of art of advertisement, they have decorations that have been traditionally applied since the ancient times. Nowadays, mixing ceramic powder with dyes of chosen colour and plasticizer, helps to make a screen- printing giving its specific shape.

Here you can see some mugs:

http://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2009/01/20/24-modern-mugs-and-creative-mug-designs/


Tiki mugs

Tiki mugs come from the Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia and are ceramic vessels from tropical restaurants and tiki bars. They have become popular because they are hand sculpted mugs, becoming more artistic and unique.