From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um.

Answering those questions that make you go, um, um, moment of um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Anna Goldfield.

Um.

One of the most wonderful things I've ever seen in a museum.

Wasn't some shiny golden statue or a cool stone axe.

It was a little clay pot, made around

3,000 years ago from what is today New Mexico. I was about 10 years old and visiting a museum

with my parents. On this little lumpy clay pot, I could see small fingerprints left by the person

who made it. The fingerprints weren't much bigger than

mine, so they must have belonged to a kid. Three thousand years ago, a kid, just like me,

was learning to make the kinds of clay pots that adults made for everyday use. I knew that my clay

came from an art supply store, but three thousand years ago, there weren't any of those.

So how did these people get clay to make their pottery? I'm not the only one with this question.

Hello, my name is Bree. I'm eight years old. I'm from Ottawa, Ontario. And my question is,

how do you make clay for pottery? Essentially, clay is rock that has been decomposed by

weather. More specifically, clay is igneous rock, which is formed when molten rock under the earth

surface solidifies. I am Lauren Sandler, and I am a ceramic artist and educator. Feldspar is one of our most

common rock-forming minerals on the earth. So when Feldspar gets weathered, there's a chemical

change that happens to Felspar. And so what happens is the molecule of water gets chemically bonded to it.

And that's actually what turns it into clay. That's what makes it soft and malleable. When we make

something with clay, I shape it with my hands and we put it back in the kiln and we put it through that

intense process of heat, that chemically bonded water escapes,

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