A pot is for storage and cooking…right?
By Jan Blatchford
For storage or cooking? That is the usual expectation, but the Neolithic potters of the Ness of Brodgar have surprised me many times and I have learned over the years that the answer to that question is not always so obvious. Looking through bags of pottery sherds is always an adventure – you never quite know what you’re going to find!
My surprise last week was to find a cordon running across the base of a vessel … on the inside!
Two conjoining sherds from the base of a large, well-fired vessel with a 20mm thick base. One sherd has a small section (~32mm) of the wall still attached to the base, allowing me to estimate the exterior angle between base and wall as being ~107 degrees. Using a rim chart I worked out that the actual diameter of the base must have been between 220mm and 280mm.
These sherds came from a big, heavy pot – not an unusual find within the Ness pottery assemblage because we often come across sherds from big pots – but what was really fascinating was the observation that there was a 13mm wide plain, applied cordon running perpendicular from the interior vessel wall towards the centre of the base.
I have never come across anything like it!
Discussing it with Nick, he remembered similarly decorated base sherds, forming a comparably sized pot, recovered from the archaeological excavation of a late Neolithic house at Crossiecrown in 2000. The pot was reconstructed and decorative details illustrated for publication as below:
Crossiecrown
The Ness pottery team hotline to Ann MacSween was soon in action. With her vast experience of analysing Neolithic pottery across Scotland, had she ever come across anything like this?
Ann quickly came back to us that she remembered some Orkney pot sherds with similar interior decoration on the base but there were very few:
Skara Brae
Pool
Links of Noltland
.
The link between all these ancient pottery base sherds is the attachment of one or more cordons across the interior surface of the base, perpendicular to the wall. In the Crossiecrown and Links of Noltland examples, the applied cordons have been carefully arranged and attached to create a cruciform design dividing the basal surface into quarters. Opposing quarters have been further decorated to reflect each other using applied pellets or incised grooves.
Without question this style of decoration is unusual and rare!
Elsewhere in the UK a single base sherd has been recovered from a developer funded excavation near Tregele in North Anglesey.
Yes, eccentric but no applied cordons. Of course, applied cordons perpendicular to the wall may not show on this small sample of the base, but I wonder if the concentric circular grooves, like those recorded on the Tregele base sherd, are more like those created when a base is formed over a woven mat or has been coiled? It is hard to judge without seeing!
It is certainly interesting that although described as “rare”, the application of perpendicular cordons across the interior basal surface has been found on sherds from several Orcadian sites, including those from other Orkney islands.
Could this style of Neolithic pottery decoration be perhaps unique to Orkney? And in any case what was the purpose of this type of decoration?
Showing pictures to a local food writer here in Orkney the instant response was “It’s like a trivet!” and it could well be that the large vessels were used like a bain marie….. but why the complexity of decoration?
Were these vessels “statement pots” as described by Alison Sheridan (Copper, M., Whittle, A. & Sheridan, A. (eds) Revisiting Grooved Ware: Understanding Ceramic Trajectories in Britain and Ireland 3200-2400 cal BC, 33-48. Oxford: Oxbow Books. (Fig. 2.9 pg.26), or did these vessels have a more ceremonial purpose? Or perhaps the quadrants may relate to the four solstice/equinox events in the agricultural year?
Lots of questions and theories that further research should hopefully provide an answer to!
