Pottery
Pottery, analysed by Beverley Ballin Smith and Olivia Lelong (GUARD)
The excavations recovered a large assemblage of prehistoric pottery, consisting of over 4,800 sherds and fragments that represented a maximum of about 1300 vessels. While that number seems high, the radiocarbon dates indicate that the settlement was inhabited for at least 500 years. Averaged over that period, the number of vessels equates to just 2.6 per year, which is probably fewer than would have been used and broken annually.
Most of the pottery fabrics contained steatite, which in many cases had been ground up and added as temper to increase the thermal shock resistance of the vessels. In other cases, the steatite may have occurred naturally in the clay. Other fabrics contained quartz sand, rock fragments, shell and bone, but these were much more rare. All of the pots were made using coils of clay that were joined and smoothed together at their upper and lower edges, and many of them broke along those joints. Some displayed evidence of having been packed or wiped with grass before firing. Although very few pots bore any decoration, many were highly burnished by rubbing the leather-hard clay. On the steatite-rich fabrics, this would have produced a shiny, silvery, almost pewter-like surface that must have been very beautiful. Some of the vessels bore burnt residues and soot, indicating they were used as cooking pots. A few of these were perforated so they could be hung over cooking fires. Some sherds had been re-used as loom weights or to smooth and rub another object – perhaps even to burnish new pots.
There were some clear variations in the pottery from different phases of the site, particularly rim forms. Structure 5 contained sherds from globular or rounded, baggy pots with rims that were sharply everted, flared, plain and T-shaped. Structure 1, by contrast, contained sherds from straight-sided, barrel- and bucket-shaped vessels as well as baggy ones, and most had plain rims. Several distinctive types of pottery were identified which might be called wares – such as small, thin-walled, steatite-rich, grey or black, highly burnished cooking pots (which occurred through most of the phases), and large, thick-walled, grey and buff storage pots heavily gritted with steatite (which were mainly found in Structure 1)
