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* < Main Page ** Chapter 6* CraftmanshipBefore the coming of metal, Neolithic people were adept at making theirartifacts out of flint, stone and wood. They were the heirs of a longtradition of working in these materials that stretched back millions ofyears to early hominids in Africa.The commonest stone shaping technique was by chipping but a method ofgrinding that resulted in a smooth, polished surface was introducedduring the Neolithic period. It is probably the only major addition toa technology that was basically a continuation of the Mesolithictraditions of the earlier period. Flint artifacts were made from narrowblades struck from a specially-shaped core. The most characteristic tool(the type-fossil, in the jargon), is a bifacially-worked leaf-shapedarrowhead. This means that it was chipped on both sides and is in theshape of a birch leaf. Other, larger, leaf-shaped forms referred to aslaurel 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 polishedtools, the axehead, made out of flint or stone, is the best-known.This tradition seems to be a homogeneous one throughout Britain andEurope despite the different styles of pottery or the variety ofmegalithic tomb or long barrows or the presence or absence of differentkinds of enclosures or houses. Variations in the tradition come withtime as it gradually distances itself from its mesolithic ancestry fromwhich in the early Neolithic period it is difficult to distinguish. Thisis certainly true of flintwork in north-western Wiltshire and probablyother places as well.We do not have a very big collection of neolithic flint/chertwork in ourmuseums which is rather surprising when we remember that it was themajor material used for tools. It is only in southern Britain that wefind large assemblages. Perhaps we should draw from this the conclusionthat a great many artifacts were made from materials that were moreperishable and so have not survived very well in every archaeologicalcontext like antler, bone and wood from which very satisfactoryfire-hardened points and cutting-edges can be made. Alternatively, rockslike quartz and basalt were employed for the same purpose where theywere available.If we look in museum collections in southern England we find some ofthese materials used for bone chisels and gouges, antler picks and rakeand shoulder blades of oxen employed for scraping up material that wasdug out of a ditch or pit. These last two together with baskets were theequipment used to excavate the enormous ditches and pile up the moundsthat comprise monuments like Avebury and Silbury Hill. At Silbury Hill awinding path encircling and climbing the hill has been discovered andone can imagine a crocodile of workmen or women with baskets on theirheads tramping up it and perhaps singing some Neolithic chant to keepthe pace going. Antler picks and shoulder-blade shovels are found inquantities in the flint mines also.Timber must have played a major part as a manufacturing material. Ourproblem is that wood does not survive in archaeological contexts unlessthe context is a waterlogged one. The most informative site is in thenorth Somerset Levels where wooden tracks have been uncovered in whatwas marshland. Nearly 6000 years ago the Sweet Track was built usingcoppiced wood and oaken planks and it is evident that the polishedaxehead was used as the general woodworking tool and not simply like themodern axe. It doubled as a wedge for splitting large timbers radiallyfor planks and smaller trees tangentially and as an adze and also forcutting down the coppiced poles. Coppiced rods were woven into a formof hurdling that was laid flat on the surface of the marsh and pinnedinto place with pegs and stakes. The presence of planks in northSomerset is a reminder of the use of them to construct the walls of thehut at Ballynagilly in Co Tyrone which was built at about the same timeas the Sweet Track.Other plant materials that were used in the Neolithic were those twistedinto basketry: reeds, vegetable fibres and so on. Although littleevidence has yet been discovered, it is assumed that the only way thatsoil could have been carried from excavation site to dump was by meansof a basket. Fibres could also be twisted into string or rope that wasprobably a basic necessity in an age that had no other method of quicklyfastening timbers together or tethering and harnessing animals.Another necessity was cloth for clothing. As far as we know it was wovenfrom plant fibres like nettles or from animal hair neither of whichsurvive in most archaeological contexts except as impressions on potteryor similar clay surfaces. Hides were the only waterproof material and wecan be sure that pigskin, goat/sheepskin and leather were used forfootwear, jerkins, hats and gloves while untanned hide could have beenused for vessels, containers and fire-screens.Whether such objects were decorated or not we cannot say but it islikely when we think of things that have survived to us from later timesor, indeed, modern objects like Indian bead costumes or the polychromepottery from Mexico and South America. Dyes were available from plantsand earth pigments had been used as colouring agents for thousands ofyears since the time of the Palaeolithic cave-paintings.We can get some idea of traditional patterns from the decorated potteryof the later Neolithic and also from the passage-grave art mentionedabove on the kerbstones of the great passage graves of the Boyne valleyin Ireland. There has been some argument as to whether this art wasornamental or symbolic. Claire O'Kelly, (a student of this art) says /'Ifeel that it is much more likely that the symbolic element wasoriginally the important one but that, as time went on, andtomb-builders became more experienced and sophisticated, aestheticconsiderations began to enter in, though perhaps never entirelyoverruling the symbolism, latent or otherwise.'/It is interesting and rather surprising to find that the earliestpottery of the Neolithic British Isles was a varied group of fine-warerather than coarsely-made vessels and suggests that pottery was anart-form that was imported and did not originate in the British Isles.The ware consisted of various burnished round-bottomed bowls that arecollectively called the Grimston-Lyles Hill series. Grimston is a sitein Yorkshire and Lyles Hill, a site in Northern Ireland.They are found in places like causewayed enclosures and in long barrowsbut do not seem to have been used for everyday purposes. Apparently thehousewife went on using the skin or wooden containers that her ancestorshad always used and it seems that pottery for the housewife was not madeuntil round about 3500BCE. These early domestic vessels wereround-bottomed pottery bowls decorated around the neck above the breakin profile that is described as a carination. Regional variations creptin and the pottery is given different names in different parts e.g.Abingdon ware and Hembury ware, the latter having a distribution fromCornwall to Sussex, and Ebbsfleet ware, an ill-defined type.But the tradition for round bottomed bowls was coming to an end. Variousflat-bottomed types appeared, the earliest a very narrow-flat base onpottery described as Fengate ware, dated at around 3000BCE. Properflat-based pottery appears with types like Grooved Ware, widelydistributed from Orkney down to southern England found in all types ofcontexts ranging from domestic, burials, pit deposits and, in Wessex, inthe great henge monuments like Durrington Walls, which suggests thatsome forms of domestic activity were taking place within its massiveembankments.Surprisingly, one type of round-based bowl lingered on. This is thestyle known as Mortlake ware, the most elaborately decorated ofneolithic pottery still being produced after 2500BCE. It is found incontexts like the West Kennet megalithic long barrows that imply it wasnot a domestic type and is a descendant of the early ritualround-bottomed Grimston/Lyles Hill series. This pottery brings to mindthe ritual stone basins in the great Boyne passage-graves which are alsoround-bottomed.In Ireland, a representative of the Grimston-Lyles Hill tradition isfound around Lough Gur and is called Limerick Ware while the laterdecorated pottery is classed as Sandhills Ware with a number of regionalvariations. The Grimston-Lyles Hill style is referred to as Neolithic Aware.In Scotland, along with the Grooved Ware, the later pottery is alldecorated with impressions of different sorts but problems dog thechronology because of the lack of radio-carbon dates for its contexts.No manufacturing site has so far been discovered for neolithic potteryand we must presume that the bulk of it was made by its users in adomestic situation. It varies a good deal in quality but almostinvariably contains a good deal of filler in order to assist the firingbut, in any case, it says much about the varied skills possessed by theNeolithic homemakers and the shared common traditions of the potters.Fillers consist of ground-up materials which are mixed with the claybefore it is shaped and which make the transmission of heat through thethickness of the clay easier during the firing stage in the bonfires inwhich the early pots were fired. The fillers can be ground-up mineralslike calcite, quartz, flint, chert, mica or fossil shells all containedin common rocks like limestone and sandstone; or organic matter, whichis reduced to carbon in the firing stage, or sand or ground up pottery(grog). These fillers (often called 'temper') can be identified under amicroscope and can sometimes allow the approximate area of manufactureof 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 wheelwas introduced and decorated by finger-pressing, incision, addition ofstrips 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 itsmaturing temperature it becomes impervious to water but early kilnscould not reach such a level so the pottery remained porous. No doubtearly pottery was coated with fats or tree resins to make it less so. Onthe other hand, a pot that allows water to permeate through its wallsand evaporate on the outside is a natural 'cool-box'.The colour of prehistoric pottery depended largely on the iron contentof the clay and on the firing conditions. If the clay is fired underoxidizing conditions (with plenty of air) the pot is generally red orbrown in colour. If the clay contains no iron, or only small amounts, itmay fire to a buff hue. Under reducing conditions (with a very smokyfire and no oxgygen surrounding the pot), the organic matter in the claymay not be burnt out, but reduced to carbon. This produces a black orgrey pot. Sometimes in poorly-fired pottery there is a 'sandwich' effectin which the interior of the walls of the pot is black and the outsidesoxidised red. There are two methods for dating baked clay. One is based on themagnetism acquired by clay during firing and the important criterion isthat it has not been moved from its original position so that the methodcan only be applied to kilns or hearths in which the pottery was fired.The method is known as palaeomagnetic dating, and depends on the factthat, on cooling, baked clay becomes lightly magnetized by the earth'smagnetic field and that the direction and intensity of the earth'smagnetic field has changed over time. These changes are known so that asample from a site can be marked with the present direction of magneticnorth before it is moved and in the laboratory the angle between thepresent and ancient directions of magnetic north can be determined. Thisallows an estimate of date to be made.Another method of absolute dating baked clay uses measurements ofthermoluminescence. This is based on the presence of very small amountsof radioactive materials in all clay and all rocks. The radiationsemitted by these radioactive impurities cause distortions in the latticestructure of the minerals, possibly through the displacement ofelectrons; but the mechanism of thermoluminiscence is not yet fullyunderstood. Strains caused by lattice distortions can be released byheating the clay to temperatures of a few hundred degrees centigrade.This happens when the pot is fired. After cooling, the radioactiveimpurities make a fresh start in distorting the lattice structure andthe strain builds up again. The amount of strain caused depends on threefactors: the percentage of radioactive impurities, the susceptibility ofthe pottery to radioactive emissions and the time elapsed since heating.Amounts of strain can be measured by reheating the pottery so that theenergy locked up in lattice distortions is released in the form ofvisible light and it can be measured. The radioactivity of the clay andits susceptibility to irradiation can be determined and from thesefactors the time since the firing of the pottery can be calculated.This technique is still relatively new and there are various problemsconnected with the preparation of the sample before testing. When theseare solved the technique can be universally employed but it willprobably remain an expensive business and may only be used for verysignificant pottery sherds.Pottery is the commonest find on most archaeological sites and it canprovide the archaeologist with s good deal of information like the1. Identification of culture, that is, the society that produced it.2. Identification of trade or cultural links between one group of peopleand another.3. From form and decoration one can derive information about artisticstyles. Ease of decoration made it the medium that many early peoplesturned 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 intersticesof the pottery.Evidence derived from pyrolosis mass spectrometry:7. Standard of living of the users from the pottery assemblage (E.g. avilla 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 ispossible to attempt a reconstruction. It is a skilled business andrequires a knowledge of the original shape of the pot but most pots arerecorded with the aid of a drawn reconstruction which can be publishedtogether with information about provenance (where the pot was found),scale, description of fabric and a note of other types of pottery foundin the same context and therefore contemporary. However, some pottery,like Roman samian ware, is so standardised that it is only necessary toquote the number attached to a particular form in the publishedDragendorf catalogue.

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