This past week, a number of Volunteers with different museum skills had the chance to take up training from Lorraine Mepham of Wessex Archaeology – on Pottery Recognition.
Organised by Finds Liaison Officer Sophie Hawke, initially with PAS Volunteers in mind, Engagement and Learning Volunteers, and others, with their own needs and interests around the topic, also attended.
We are talking domesticity and archaeology here, rather than fine wares and art, but we covered most aspects. The Portable Antiquities Scheme Volunteers need to be able to identify the sherds which are brought in for recording on the British Museum’s PAS database, and to be able to describe them for the record. Pottery is very important as a dating tool for other finds from the same sites.
As Lorraine explained, the pottery remains can inform about the purpose of an archaeological site, the status of the people living or working there in the past, and tell us about production (eg technology), trade (Local? Foreign?), and even about food types, as well as fashion and design changes.
Pottery is always clay, of course, and these days, scientific analysis can tell us exactly where the material came from (though the analysis is expensive!). Science may also tell us, even after centuries, what food was last inside the pot.
Clay, on its own, isn’t usually strong enough to last, unless fired at very high temperatures. These temperatures could not be achieved early on, in simple bonfire or ‘clamp’ kilns, so mixing the clay with something was important. We thus were introduced to ‘temper’ – anything from straw and grasses to pounded limestone, shell or flint. Or, indeed, smashed up pot fragments. Identifying the temper is one of the ways of identifying the pottery.
Early Neolithic (Stone Age) pot looks like ‘rocky road’ (my description!) and almost good enough to eat. If lucky enough to find a piece of rim or part of the semi spherical base, that helps with recognition as there may be holes near the rim, for suspension, or the blackened rounded base will be the clue that they were made for cooking – suspended over the fire, not for setting on the ground.
By the Bronze Age, pots could be larger, with flat bases, and more decorative with markings made in the soft clay by anything handy. Pots are often found in burials. Interestingly, adult burials have decorated pots, children’s graves have plain….
In late Bronze Age and early Iron Age pottery finger-tip decoration is common. Seeing the marks of finger nails and of ‘pinching’ in the clay, from thousands of years ago, is quite something.
By the Late Iron Age, contact with the continent, and with the spreading Roman Empire, saw the introduction of the potter’s wheel, and, gradually, improved kilns. But not everywhere. Fine wares began to appear, with slightly inferior British versions following on.
We had two days of training so look out for more on this blog, about Roman and Medieval pottery, next week.