Yes. Pottery is how you date much of the archeological sites, looking for style changes. The bronzes are fancy copies of the pottery, which was really used for cooking and storage. The bronzes, by the way, don’t use the lost wax method. They use molds which are created inside out, so bumps have to be made as depressions.
The only pottery I really studied was Hittite. And it’s more intellectually interesting than visually beautiful.
Now AFTER the Shang and Zhou periods, they made some incredible ceramic copies of the earlier bronzes. And even made versions in JADE! Even today, you can buy reproductions of the bronzes and of the ceramic versions.
Thanks for the primer on Chinese ceramics.
One other question on the bronzes...
Since the written Chinese language has a distinct geometric quality, I wondered if any of the geometric “decorations” on the bronze vessels were actually words?