While ancient Near Eastern peoples tended to use earthenware vessels for preparing and eating food, many Jews in Second Temple-era Judea preferred stoneware; many scholars believe they did so because pottery could become ritually impure, while stone could not. A recent discovery lends credence to this theory, as Amanda Borschel-Dan writes:
A large 2,000-year-old Second Temple-period chalkstone quarry and workshop was discovered at Reina in the lower Galilee, . . . between Nazareth and the village of Kana. . . . [The] stoneware workshop [is] one of only four in Israel. . . .
The workshop is situated in an artificially hewn cave, [as evidence by the presence of] chisel marks. Inside the cave, archaeologists discovered the detritus of lathe-made stoneware—thousands of stone cores. . . . [H]undreds of unfinished or damaged vessels were also found.
“The production waste indicates that this workshop produced mainly handled mugs and bowls of various sizes. The finished products were marketed throughout the region here in Galilee, and our finds provide striking evidence that Jews here were scrupulous regarding the purity laws,” said [Yonatan Adler, who directed the excavation]. . . . “The current excavations will hopefully help us answer the question of how long these laws continued to be observed among the Jews of Galilee during the course of the Roman period,” he said.
The nearby town of Kana (or Cana), is described in the New Testament as the place where water, held in six such stone vessels, was miraculously transformed into wine.
Read more on Times of Israel: http://www.timesofisrael.com/2000-year-old-stone-workshop-discovered-near-where-jesus-turned-water-into-wine/