- Chap'ter Nineteen -
Deverel-Rimbury tradition and continuing to develop though time, continue to form
the bases of the domestic repertoires but fine wares are often extremely well made
and highly decorated, tending to capture and monopolize archaeological attention.
TECHNOLOGY
The technology of prehistoric has been well summarized recently by Ann Woods
(Gibson and Woods 1990) and no reiteration of that work is necessary here save
some short, introductory remarks.
In iron age Britain, as in the preceding Neolithic and Bronze Age, until the Roman
occupation, only a limited number of techniques was used to build a pot: pinching,
ring-building, coil-building, strap-building or slab-building. No wheel-thrown
vessels are present in the British archaeological record until the introduction of
Gallo-Belgic wares in the first century Be. This does not preclude the use of a wheel
in the pre-Belgic Iron Age, however, and a wheel or a turntable could well have been
used for the building or finishing of a vessel. Nevertheless, the technique of wheel-
throwing does not appear in the British ceramic repertoire until the Roman conquest
and is consequently outside the scope of this chapter.
Pinching, the first-mentioned of the other pot-building techniques, is the simplest
method of manufacture, involving pinching the clay outwards and upwards from a
single ball to raise the sides of a simple pot. The technique is best suited to small cups
or closed bowls but need not be confined to these forms; pinched bowls may well
form a basis for larger vessels if supplemented by another technique. Woods has
already clearly described the difficulties of recognizing this technique and the ease
with which pinched vessels can be confused with similar but differently constructed
vessels (Gibson and Woods 1990: 40-2).
Ring-, coil-or strap-building are closely related techniques and it is by these
methods that the majority of iron age pottery vessels were made. In the first two
techniques, cylinders of clay are rolled out and joined, one on top of the other,
to build up the shape of the pot. In ring-building the pot is built up using distinct
layers and in coil-building the cylinders overlap and spiral upwards. The technique
of strap-building is similar save that the cylinders of clay are first flattened and joined
together on edge so that greater height is given to the rings. The surfaces of the vessel
are then smoothed over by the fingers or some other tool so that the rings or coils
are hidden. Frequently many vessels are found to have broken along the line of a
poorly bonded join (Figure 19.2) and the round surface of the clay ring or coil will
be visible in the breaks. Join voids between poorly bonded cylinders may also be
visible in the sections of large sherds. It is frequently impossible to differentiate
between these closely related techniques in sherd material (Woods 1989).
Slab-building, as the term implies, involves the building of the walls of a pot
from a number of slabs of clay: prefabricated pottery! Once more this is a difficult
technique to recognize amongst sherd assemblies and its apparent rarity amongst
the British material may be a direct result of the inability of scholars readily to
identify its use, in stark contrast to the ease with which ring-building can be
recognized.
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