During the last forty years, and especially during the last twenty, the steady growth of archaeological study and increased attention to excavations have enormously increased both the material at command and the power of utilising it with scientific method. The extensive finds of pottery in Greece, Asia Minor, Northern Africa, Italy, and elsewhere, including more especially products of the earlier periods, have enabled the students of the subject to trace the sequence of fabrics from the rude wares of Troy and the Greek Islands up to the graceful and finished products of the Athenian _ateliers_, and onward to the overgrown luxuriousness of the gigantic Apulian wares. The subjects of the paintings, once of all-absorbing, are now only of subordinate interest, except so far as they illustrate certain phases of development, and the chief interest of the vases is the question of their origin, their maker, or their place in relation to others. It will therefore be the object of this and of the succeeding chapters to trace with all possible detail, as far as space permits, the history of Greek vase-manufacture and vase-painting in all their aspects. We have already indicated (p. 31) the limits within which the subject falls, and the convenient rough division into four main classes of which it permits (p. 23). This introductory chapter, therefore, deals with the primitive fabrics, leading up, through the two following, to the period of black-figured vases in Chapter IX. The lines of demarcation are, indeed, difficult if not impossible to draw, but they must not in any case be taken as rigid ones, being largely conventional, and only adopted in order to obtain a point of division for the chapters. Perhaps the leading feature of the early history of Greek vases is the gradual coalescence of the numerous local fabrics first into two or three main streams, and finally into the one great and all-absorbing current of Athenian art. In the sixth century this was really brought about more by historical causes than anything else, as a result of the gradually increasing supremacy of Athens in art and culture from the time of the Peisistratidae down to that of Perikles.