Planning an experiment.

Not only am I running the Neolithic pottery workshop with Alan Bruford, I’m also running a few experiments at the same time.  Part of this is to make several small pots with the same base clay and different refractory/ thermally resistant materials, and film them while they are being fired, and the pot without any temper/ grog starts to spall in front of the fire where the others will remain intact. I carried out this experiment a few years ago with 2 pots but never filmed it.  It’s like a Ceramics installation - if it’s not filmed there and then , the moment will  be gone for good.  This blog article is the start of this process

This little pinch pot has crushed quartz in it which I will add to clay to use as a temper/ grog. I will make a pot with no grog, and one with sand. They will be in a row by the fire and whilst drying by the fire the one without any grog will start to spall. They won’t  look any different from each other and it’s one of those things , you think, OMG why is that happening?  It’s because the sand or quartz tempered pots are more thermally resistant than the pot with nothing added.

So this sherd comes from the Hembury assemblage, it is burnished and has a small fraction of quartz in it. The burnish marks can also be seen across the pot. It looks as though its been carried out quickly with long strokes which are crisscrossing. This sherd is almost a complete profile of a pot. This is unusual, Its lasted longer than many of the more abraided sherds in the assemblage.  this is in my opinion due to the small fraction of quartz temper/grog. One of the Neolithic potters at Hembury was trying something very different.  This small fraction of quartz is produced by smashing up quartz, 

Neolithic Potters Toolkit

So, I’ve been making experimental British Neolithic pots. Not confining myself to the Southwest Hembury Bowl Style,  I’ve been making some carinated cups, using a a pinch pot method, allowing  it to dry to where it’s just off  leather hard, then paddled and thinned  out. Then reinforce and flatten the rim, then add flattened coils and that’s the basis of a carinated bowl. I used the small quartz pebbles as ribs to get a fairly uniform curve above the carinated shoulder. So I haven’t been using any modern materials, metal, rubber, plastics.. I have hide, shells, bone pins, flint burins , flakes and blades, a granite hammer stone, for smashing up vein quartz- it’s in the little Must Farm type pot( not Neolithic 🤣😀 just beautiful and as a potter I’m an artist).  A wooden paddle and some Stoke Hill Exeter clay.  I’m making a quartz tempered pot, based on a large sherd that was found in the same assemblage as the Hembury Bowl.  It’s a cup/bowl with an everted  rim. It’s black and Burnished on the surface.  Pictures to follow.
So I’ve been smashing up quartz. It’s harder work than anything. The granite hammer stone has taken a beating so there might be bits of mica and feldspar in the mix. 🤣I think the piece of quartz I was using is very akin to a piece of elvan. Very hard. I’ve smashed as much off it as I can.  I’ve got some more friable type of quartz which I got off a tailings heap at Devon United Mines nr Peter Tavy. So that will be the next piece to be smashed up.

Neolithic Pottery Firing Weekend

As I am making all these pots, they will have to be fired and this’s  going to happen at an event being held  weekend of 14/06 at Alan Bruford’s Forest School,  Beacon  Cross Copse, Talaton , Devon. https://m.facebook.com/events/475518046350931/?event_time_id=475518053017597&ref=bookmarks&_rdr

So pleased and happy

First Neolithic Gabbro carinated bowl. I suppose the model for this would be the Windmill Hill bowl which is in the British Museum. And also the Carn Brea assemblage. The excavations took place in the 1970s under the direction of the late Roger Mercer. The report was published in 1981, in Kernow Hendyscans(Cornish Archaeology). There is only one small sherd of  a carinated bowls at Hembury. But there were a number found at Carn Brea,

 The illustrations are from theCarn Brea excavation report. on Cornish Archaeology Journal. I have included a bibliography in earlier posts which references this publication.  I  will eventually go and study this assemblage. 

Operation gabbro/Hembury bowl.

The reenactment  of a ceramic chaine operatoire is a lengthy labor intensive  business. I’ve been  teaching my prehistoric pottery course over the last 2 weeks and this has involved going out prospecting for clays, on Crousa Down, Lizard, Cornwall.

So as a team we have dug out gabbro clay in the Lizard, Cornwall from 3-4 locations. This  involved  deturfing, digging a hole and then auguring out the clay.  We took a bucket from each location.  The second step is then processing the clay until it is plastic enough to make pots.  This is done either by wet or dry processing. Robin and Mallory, in the picture,  did all the work (heroes)

Mallory is dry processing by crushing and sieving the clay and we wet processed the clay and then had to sieve it to remove all the stone. The wet slip is then dried on a plaster or wooden bat. My colleagues at Flameworks have remarked on the amount of work that is required to make this clay I to a material plastic enough to make a pot.  Contemporary studio potters normally use co mmercial bagged clays.  we’ve made shrinkage and temperature test tiles. 

When a new Clay is dug test need to be performed to test its plasticity, it’s shrinkage rate and it’s firing/ maturing temperature. Most clays will likely fire to 750*C before melting so we’ve made four tiles to test each clay. They dill be fired successively higher each time starting at 750*C , then 950*C , 1150*C and maybe  , if they don’t melt before this last high temperature to 1250*C. If it is possible to fire them up to 1250*C maintain shape, performance with a fairly low shrinkage rate then we would have found a good potting, stoneware clay. 

                                              

Once the test tiles have been fired the various shrinkage rates  be worked out for dry ware, totally dry ware, shrinkage once fired at the successive temperatures. Most shrinkage occurs between wet/plastic  stage. The best way to achieve plasticity is age the clay for over a year butwe don’t have time for that b

A moment in Time during the Neolithic.

So, I researched the Hembury Causewayed Enclosure Ceramic assemblage , which gave me a more intimate connection to the potters who had made these pots. They had left all sorts of marks on these pots. Burnishing marks, wipe marks , adjoining coils/flat sausages, finger nail imprints. There was little or no decoration on these pots but they were made rapidly, not highly crafted as the Hembury Bowl was.
But later, thoughts about the connection between the C14 dates and the sherds began to emerge and to capture this , I’ve had to write it down before it escapes me again.
So the C14 dates from Gathering Time gives us broad parameters of a range of time - about  100-150 years in which these pots occur in the archaeological  record. But paradoxically, a piece of pottery or flint tool are just a moment in time.  There’s a disconnect between these two ideas. It’s almost a paradox. A dialectic. It’s an archaeological problem from which chronological theories have emerged.

So experimental archaeology, the production of replica ceramics , re-enactment of a ceramic chaine  operatoire can provide an insight into these problems.  As the experimental archaeologist , I am the actor who performs the chaine. My lifetime and the making of a few Neolithic pots gives me a perspective on just how much of that 150 years it takes to make these pots.
And the specific insight, for the archaeologist is that, in terms of time, this pot would take about 30- 45 minutes to make , a couple of hours to fire, and could further define Whittles calendrical, generational , perspectives down to limits of minutes and hours, even begin to look at an individual Neolithic potters activities.