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* Chapter 6*


      Craftmanship

Before the coming of metal, Neolithic people were adept at making their
artifacts out of flint, stone and wood. They were the heirs of a long
tradition of working in these materials that stretched back millions of
years to early hominids in Africa.

The commonest stone shaping technique was by chipping but a method of
grinding that resulted in a smooth, polished surface was introduced
during the Neolithic period.  It is probably the only major addition to
a technology that was basically a continuation of the Mesolithic
traditions of the earlier period. Flint artifacts were made from narrow
blades struck from a specially-shaped core. The most characteristic tool
(the type-fossil, in the jargon), is a bifacially-worked leaf-shaped
arrowhead. This means that it was chipped on both sides and is in the
shape of a birch leaf. Other, larger, leaf-shaped forms referred to as
laurel leaves were used for other tools.  One type had a chisel edge .
Other forms were single-piece sickle blades, various forms of knives,
scrapers, borers  and tools made out of narrow blades. Of the polished
tools, the axehead, made out of flint or stone, is the best-known.

This tradition seems to be a homogeneous one throughout Britain and
Europe despite the different styles of pottery or the variety of
megalithic tomb or long barrows or the presence or absence of different
kinds of enclosures or houses. Variations in the tradition come with
time as it gradually distances itself from its mesolithic ancestry from
which in the early Neolithic period it is difficult to distinguish. This
is certainly true of flintwork in north-western Wiltshire and probably
other places as well.

We do not have a very big collection of neolithic flint/chertwork in our
museums which is rather surprising when we remember that it was the
major material used for tools. It is only in southern Britain that we
find large assemblages. Perhaps we should draw from this the conclusion
that a great many artifacts were made from materials that were more
perishable and so have not survived very well in every archaeological
context like antler, bone and wood from which very satisfactory
fire-hardened points and cutting-edges can be made. Alternatively, rocks
like quartz and basalt were employed for the same purpose where they
were available.

If we look in museum collections in southern England we find some of
these materials used for bone chisels and gouges, antler picks and rake
and shoulder blades of oxen employed for scraping up material that was
dug out of a ditch or pit. These last two together with baskets were the
equipment used to excavate the enormous ditches and pile up the mounds
that comprise monuments like Avebury and Silbury Hill. At Silbury Hill a
winding path encircling and climbing the hill has been discovered and
one can imagine a crocodile of workmen or women with baskets on their
heads tramping up it and perhaps singing some Neolithic chant to keep
the pace going. Antler picks and shoulder-blade shovels are found in
quantities in the flint mines also.

Timber must have played a major part as a manufacturing material. Our
problem is that wood does not survive in archaeological contexts unless
the context is a waterlogged one. The most informative site is in the
north Somerset Levels where wooden tracks have been uncovered in what
was marshland. Nearly 6000 years ago the Sweet Track was built using
coppiced wood and oaken planks and it is evident that the polished
axehead was used as the general woodworking tool and not simply like the
modern axe. It doubled as a wedge for splitting large timbers radially
for planks and smaller trees tangentially and as an adze and also for
cutting down the coppiced poles.  Coppiced rods were woven into a form
of hurdling that was laid flat on the surface of the marsh and pinned
into place with pegs and stakes. The presence of planks in north
Somerset is a reminder of the use of them to construct the walls of the
hut at Ballynagilly in Co Tyrone which was built at about the same time
as the Sweet Track.

Other plant materials that were used in the Neolithic were those twisted
into basketry: reeds, vegetable fibres and so on. Although little
evidence has yet been discovered, it is assumed that the only way that
soil could have been carried from excavation site to dump was by means
of a basket. Fibres could also be twisted into string or rope that was
probably a basic necessity in an age that had no other method of quickly
fastening timbers together or tethering and harnessing animals.

Another necessity was cloth for clothing. As far as we know it was woven
from plant fibres like nettles or from animal hair neither of which
survive in most archaeological contexts except as impressions on pottery
or similar clay surfaces. Hides were the only waterproof material and we
can be sure that pigskin, goat/sheepskin and leather were used for
footwear, jerkins, hats and gloves while untanned hide could have been
used for vessels, containers and fire-screens.

Whether such objects were decorated or not we cannot say but it is
likely when we think of things that have survived to us from later times
or, indeed, modern objects like Indian bead costumes or the polychrome
pottery from Mexico and South America. Dyes were available from plants
and earth pigments had been used as colouring agents for thousands of
years since the time of the Palaeolithic cave-paintings.

We can get some idea of traditional patterns from the decorated pottery
of the later Neolithic and also from the passage-grave art mentioned
above on the kerbstones of the great passage graves of the Boyne valley
in Ireland. There has been some argument as to whether this art was
ornamental or symbolic. Claire O'Kelly, (a student of this art) says /'I
feel that it is much more likely that the symbolic element was
originally the important one but that, as time went on, and
tomb-builders became more experienced and sophisticated, aesthetic
considerations began to enter in, though perhaps never entirely
overruling the symbolism, latent or otherwise.'/

It is interesting and rather surprising to find that the earliest
pottery of the Neolithic British Isles was a varied group of fine-ware
rather than coarsely-made vessels and suggests that pottery was an
art-form that was imported and did not originate in the British Isles.
The ware consisted of various burnished round-bottomed bowls that are
collectively called the Grimston-Lyles Hill series. Grimston is a site
in Yorkshire and Lyles Hill, a site in Northern Ireland.

They are found in places like causewayed enclosures and in long barrows
but do not seem to have been used for everyday purposes. Apparently the
housewife went on using the skin or wooden containers that her ancestors
had always used and it seems that pottery for the housewife was not made
until round about 3500BCE. These early domestic vessels were
round-bottomed pottery bowls decorated around the neck above the break
in profile that is described as a carination. Regional variations crept
in and the pottery is given different names in different parts e.g.
Abingdon ware and Hembury ware, the latter having a distribution from
Cornwall to Sussex, and Ebbsfleet ware, an ill-defined type.

But the tradition for round bottomed bowls was coming to an end. Various
flat-bottomed types appeared, the earliest a very narrow-flat base on
pottery described as Fengate ware, dated at around 3000BCE. Proper
flat-based pottery appears with types like Grooved Ware, widely
distributed from Orkney down to southern England found in all types of
contexts ranging from domestic, burials, pit deposits and, in Wessex, in
the great henge monuments like Durrington Walls, which suggests that
some forms of domestic activity were taking place within its massive
embankments.

Surprisingly, one type of round-based bowl lingered on. This is the
style known as Mortlake ware, the most elaborately decorated of
neolithic pottery still being produced after 2500BCE. It is found in
contexts like the West Kennet megalithic long barrows that imply it was
not a domestic type and is a descendant of the early ritual
round-bottomed Grimston/Lyles Hill series. This pottery brings to mind
the ritual stone basins in the great Boyne passage-graves which are also
round-bottomed.

In Ireland, a representative of the Grimston-Lyles Hill tradition is
found around Lough Gur and is called Limerick Ware while the later
decorated pottery is classed as Sandhills Ware with a number of regional
variations. The Grimston-Lyles Hill style is referred to as Neolithic A
ware.

In Scotland, along with the Grooved Ware, the later pottery is all
decorated with impressions of different sorts but problems dog the
chronology because of the lack of radio-carbon dates for its contexts.

No manufacturing site has so far been discovered for neolithic pottery
and we must presume that the bulk of it was made by its users in a
domestic situation. It varies a good deal in quality but almost
invariably contains a good deal of filler in order to assist the firing
but, in any case, it says much about the varied skills possessed by the
Neolithic homemakers and the shared common traditions of the potters.

Fillers consist of ground-up materials which are mixed with the clay
before it is shaped and which make the transmission of heat through the
thickness of the clay easier during the firing stage in the bonfires in
which the early pots were fired. The fillers can be ground-up minerals
like calcite, quartz, flint, chert, mica or fossil shells all contained
in common rocks like limestone and sandstone; or organic matter, which
is reduced to carbon in the firing stage, or sand or ground up pottery
(grog). These fillers (often called 'temper') can be identified under a
microscope and can sometimes allow the approximate area of manufacture
of the pottery to be pinned down.

When the pot has been shaped it was left to dry in the sun or by a fire.
Pots were shaped by hand for thousand of years before the potter's wheel
was introduced and decorated by finger-pressing, incision, addition of
strips or blobs of clay to the wet surface, puncturing or engraving.
After the pot was thoroughly dry, it was fired. If clay is fired to its
maturing temperature it becomes impervious to water but early kilns
could not reach such a level so the pottery remained porous. No doubt
early pottery was coated with fats or tree resins to make it less so. On
the other hand, a pot that allows water to permeate through its walls
and evaporate on the outside is a natural 'cool-box'.

The colour of prehistoric pottery depended largely on the iron content
of the clay and on the firing conditions. If the clay is fired under
oxidizing conditions (with plenty of air) the pot is generally red or
brown in colour. If the clay contains no iron, or only small amounts, it
may fire to a buff hue. Under reducing conditions (with a very smoky
fire and no oxgygen surrounding the pot), the organic matter in the clay
may not be burnt out, but reduced to carbon. This produces a black or
grey pot. Sometimes in poorly-fired pottery there is a 'sandwich' effect
in which the interior of the walls of the pot is black and the outsides
oxidised red. 

There are two methods for dating baked clay. One is based on the
magnetism acquired by clay during firing and the important criterion is
that it has not been moved from its original position so that the method
can only be applied to kilns or hearths in which the pottery was fired.
The method is known as palaeomagnetic dating, and depends on the fact
that, on cooling, baked clay becomes lightly magnetized by the earth's
magnetic field and that the direction and intensity of the earth's
magnetic field has changed over time. These changes are known so that a
sample from a site can be marked with the present direction of magnetic
north before it is moved and in the laboratory the angle between the
present and ancient directions of magnetic north can be determined. This
allows an estimate of date to be made.

Another method of absolute dating baked clay uses measurements of
thermoluminescence. This is based on the presence of very small amounts
of radioactive materials in all clay and all rocks. The radiations
emitted by these radioactive impurities cause distortions in the lattice
structure of the minerals, possibly through the displacement of
electrons; but the mechanism of thermoluminiscence is not yet fully
understood. Strains caused by lattice distortions can be released by
heating the clay to temperatures of a few hundred degrees centigrade.
This happens when the pot is fired. After cooling, the radioactive
impurities make a fresh start in distorting the lattice structure and
the strain builds up again. The amount of strain caused depends on three
factors: the percentage of radioactive impurities, the susceptibility of
the pottery to radioactive emissions and the time elapsed since heating.
Amounts of strain can be measured by reheating the pottery so that the
energy locked up in lattice distortions is released in the form of
visible light and it can be measured. The radioactivity of the clay and
its susceptibility to irradiation can be determined and from these
factors the time since the firing of the pottery can be calculated.

This technique is still relatively new and there are various problems
connected with the preparation of the sample before testing. When these
are solved the technique can be universally employed but it will
probably remain an expensive business and may only be used for very
significant pottery sherds.

Pottery is the commonest find on most archaeological sites and it can
provide the archaeologist with s good deal of information like the

1. Identification of culture, that is, the society that produced it.

2. Identification of trade or cultural links between one group of people
and another.

3. From form and decoration one can derive information about artistic
styles. Ease of decoration made it the medium that many early peoples
turned to first as outlets for their creativity (e.g. Greek vases)

4. Technical achievement.

5. Chronology of a site.

6. Evidence of diet from food debris inside it or trapped in interstices
of the pottery.

Evidence derived from pyrolosis mass spectrometry:

7. Standard of living of the users from the pottery assemblage (E.g. a
villa site can be distinguished from a farmstead)

8. Place of manufacture of the pottery. 

If enough sherds belonging to a particular pot come to light then it is
possible to attempt a reconstruction. It is a skilled business and
requires a knowledge of the original shape of the pot but most pots are
recorded with the aid of a drawn reconstruction which can be published
together with information about provenance (where the pot was found),
scale, description of fabric and a note of other types of pottery found
in the same context and therefore contemporary. However, some pottery,
like Roman samian ware, is so standardised that it is only necessary to
quote the number attached to a particular form in the published
Dragendorf catalogue.

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