Accidental damage: Skilled potter Sabariah repairs damage to pots after a rooster leapt from wet pot to pot.

There is a small Sasak village where progress has been assessed and found wanting; a village where horse and cart are deemed the most reliable form of transportation, where electricity use has never passed the occasional single white neon, where computers have yet to be found useful and cell phones a rarity.

Each day follows the one before with a habitual rhythm, a melody passed from old women's hands to their granddaughters, truncating village history to the life span of the matriarchs.

Without any written language, this village has a memory spanning just seven decades, yet the unchanging handicrafts sitting in museums tell of Masbagik Timor's millennium-long history as a potter's village.

"I have been making that pot design since the Japanese were here," explains great-grandmother Jumaiyah, indicating the handmade water pots called ceret maling (water-sneaks). These are exact replicas of those dated at 1,000 years in the museum and are said to carry "the sweetest water", according to a Mataram museum visitor.

Jumaiyah learned the cunning craft of these extraordinarily tricky pots from her grandmother, but remembers them has being formed from a time of discord in the village's rhythm - the Japanese occupation that was the last event of note to mark the passage of time in this east Lombok village.

At 80 years of age or more and still a great beauty, Jumaiyah is dirt poor, despite her artistic skills, polished over decades. Her studio is a tiny earth-floored bamboo shack off her bedroom, also built over packed earth and walled with woven bamboo. Jumaiyah sells her ceret maling for less than one dollar a pieces, but profess a love for making her pots, ignoring the aggressive arthritis that slows down production.

"It keeps me fit. I've been making these for 67 years and I still love the clay," Jumaiyah says.

Ceret maling are filled with water from the base. A hidden inner chamber holds the fluid and there is no stopper; the secrets of both the design and the construction are known only to potters like Jumaiyah and the granddaughters she gifts with her tricks.

In Masbagik, the women hold the destiny of the village in their hands. It is the women who make the traditional pottery and prepare the clay dug up by the men and ferried half a dozen kilometers by horse and cart. Men also support the women by gathering the grass, coconut husks, sawdust and timber to fire the open-air, ground kilns.

The men work hard, but it is the women's pots that ensure the village's livelihood.

"This is women's special skill. Grandmothers teach their daughters and granddaughters the pottery-making traditions. Men are only the helpers in this process," says 23-year-old Masyhur. "The pots are exported to Bali. That means we can survive and keep to our traditional way of life. Young girls can work here from their own homes with their families and don't need to leave the village to work as a migrant worker *abroad* or in the cities."

Masyhur adds that there is little change in the designs of the pots, which are sold at the markets and exported to an art shop in Bali.

"The women make water pots, mortar and pestles, rice storage pots and cooking stoves. The most recent innovation in the stoves was in 2004 during the elections when a potter put an extra wood hole in the base of a stove. That's called the SBY design, out of respect for the President."

The clay of Masbagik is smooth and elastic; in the potter's hands it comes to life. For the past 35 years, Sabariah has been shaping the pots on her front veranda.

"I make around 20 to 25 pots a day," she says, pulling a lug of clay and adding it to an ever-growing urn turned slowly by hand. "Our clay is much finer and smoother than in other parts of Lombok."

Her day's work of still-wet pots surrounds Sabariah. A rooster bounds onto the veranda and leaps from pot to pot, imprinting each piece with its talons. Sabariah catches and removes the mischief-maker then patiently repairs the damage. Unstressed by the additional workload, she says that even after 35 years she still loves the feel of clay under her hands.

Next door, her 20-year-old daughter is still an apprentice. "She is just learning," says Sabariah as her daughter turns out massive pot after massive pot, her ancestral senses in sympathy with the dance of clay choreographed long before she was born.

Nearby an ancient, bent-backed woman tends the kiln that fires these earth-born vessels into soft red stone, the terracotta that may be unearthed again in this form in another 1,000 years. She nudges and coaxes the quiet flame to gently drive off the moisture locked in the clay's structure. Her skill is exquisite: Too much heat too fast and the pots will shatter, too low a temperature and they will revert to mud.

She fires these pots on the ground, tucking in slow-burning coconut husks to warm the pots. Then, over the next 12 to 15 hours, she adds wood shavings, kindling and, lastly, the dried grass, whose incandescent heat pushes the temperature well above 700 degrees Celsius.

This white-haired woman has no need of a thermometer, wants no potter's kiln cones to guide her; she fires from the heart.

Nearby her great-granddaughter watches and learns, ready to take her place in the unchanging history of Masbagik's potters.

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