Insight from Innovation: An Introduction

INSIGHT FROM INNOVATION: New Light on Archaeological Ceramics Papers presented in honour of Professor David Peacock’s contributions to archaeological ceramic studies Edited by Emilie Sibbesson, Ben Jervis and Sarah Coxon HP SOUTHAMPTON MONOGRAPHS IN ARCHAEOLOGY NEW SERIES 6 © Individual authors ISBN 978-0-9926336-4-6 A CIP record for this book is available from The British Library Published by The Highield Press 75 Watson Avenue, St Andrews, KY16 8JE http://highieldpress.org/ This book is available from Oxbow Books Ltd, 10 Hythe Bridge Street, Oxford, OX1 2EW or from Casemate Academic, 1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083, USA http://www.oxbowbooks.com/ Cover design: Holy Mountain Media Printed in Great Britain by The Short Run Press Ltd, Exeter 2016 David Peacock 1939 - 2015 Southampton Monographs in Archaeology The Stone of Life Querns, Mills and Flour Production in Europe up to c. AD 500 David Peacock Farming and Fishing in the Outer Hebrides, AD 600 to 1700 The Udal, North Uist Dale Serjeantson The Life and Death of Querns The Deposition and Use-contexts of Querns in South-Western England from the Neolithic to the Iron Age Susan R. Watts Interpreting Shipwrecks Maritime Archaeology Approaches Edited by Jonathan Adams and Johan Rönnby Turning Stone to Bread A Diachronic Study of Millstone Making in Southern Spain Timothy J. Anderson Insight from Innovation New Light on Archaeological Ceramics Edited by Emilie Sibbesson, Ben Jervis and Sarah Coxon Published by The Highield Press Distributed by Oxbow Books CONTENTS List of illustrations.......................................................................................................vii List of tables...................................................................................................................xi Contributors..................................................................................................................xii Foreword by Simon Keay...........................................................................................xvi David Peacock 1939-2015 by Michael Fulford........................................................xx Editors’ Introduction.................................................................................................xxx Chapter 1. Context is Everything: Early Pottery, Hunter-Gatherers....................1 and the Interpretation of Technological Choices in Eastern Siberia Peter M. Hommel, Peter M. Day, Peter Jordan and Viktor M. Vetrov Chapter 2. The Social Life of Clay: A Metaphysical Characterisation...............19 of Ceramics through Petrographic Analysis Imogen Wood Chapter 3. Revealing Complexity: The Sourcing of Early Neolithic.................42 Ceramics in South-West Britain Henrietta Quinnell and Roger Taylor Chapter 4. Phytolith Analysis of Ceramic Thin-Sections. First..........................57 Taphonomical Insights from Experiments with Vegetal Tempering Ákos Pető and Luc Vrydaghs Chapter 5. Taking the Rough with the Smooth: Using Automated...................74 SEM-EDS to Integrate Coarse and Fine Ceramic Assemblages in the Bronze Age Aegean Jill Hilditch, Duncan Pirrie, Carl Knappett, Nicoletta Momigliano and Gavyn Rollinson Chapter 6. Visualisation, Quantitative Mineralogy and Matrix-..........................97 Inclusion Separation of Pottery using QEMSCAN: Examples of Medieval and Post-Medieval Pottery from Somerset Jens Andersen, Gavyn Rollinson and David Dawson v INSIGHT FROM INNOVATION Chapter 7. Non-Destructive Analysis of Samian Ware from Scottish............118 Military Sites Richard Jones and Louisa Campbell Chapter 8. Fired Fingers: Investigating Pottery Production through..............137 Finger Imprints Yvonne de Rue Chapter 9. Same but Different: Revisiting Ceramic Variation..........................152 Sarah Coxon Chapter 10. A Picture Says a Thousand Words? Decoration, Effect................170 and Medieval Pottery Ben Jervis Chapter 11. Experiencing Lustre: Polynomial Texture Mapping of..................186 Medieval Pottery at The Fitzwilliam Museum Rebecca Bridgman and Graeme Earl Chapter 12. Vessel Volumes and Visualisation: Innovative Computer.............199 Applications for Ceramicists Matt Brudenell, Vicki Herring and Donald Horne Chapter 13. Pots and Pies: Adventures into the Archaeology............................221 of Eating Habits in Byzantium Joanita Vroom Chapter 14. The Resonance of Gabbroic Clay in Contemporary.....................245 Ceramic Works Helen Marton Chapter 15. ‘Hold Your Beliefs Lightly’: Innovation and Best Practice..........253 in Prehistoric, Roman and Post-Roman Ceramic Studies in Britain Jane Evans, Duncan Brown and David Knight Index............................................................................................................................270 vi Insight from Innovation: An Introduction Ben Jervis, Emilie Sibbesson and Sarah Coxon In the autumn of 2012 and on behalf of the Southampton Ceramics Research Group, we hosted a conference at the University of Southampton in honour of Professor David Peacock’s contributions to archaeological ceramic studies. In the spirit of David Peacock’s work on the ethnography of pottery production and the application of scientiic techniques to the study of archaeological ceramics, we based the conference and its proceedings upon the theme of innovation. This theme accommodated not only innovative development of analytical techniques and interpretive frameworks but also new light on how people in the past interacted with ceramics. Each paper presented at the conference relected the lasting impact of David Peacock’s own work, and the event brought together niches of ceramic studies that rarely meet in today’s highly specialised and compartmented archaeology. What has resulted is, we feel, a volume which relects some of the most exciting developments currently taking place within archaeological ceramic studies, including new frontiers in provenanceing techniques and computer-aided visualisations. We hope that this volume will be testament to David Peacock’s legacy of innovative approaches to archaeological ceramics. His own – often collaborative – research covered thousands of years and the geographical scope was equally vast; stretching from Cornwall to Egypt and beyond. Here, the scope is extended to include, for instance, the Siberian Palaeolithic, medieval Iran and Syria, and the Antonine frontier in Scotland. We have loosely structured the volume around the biography of pottery, starting with papers which deal with sourcing materials, working through production and decoration to the study of vessel volume and use. We close with two thoughtprovoking papers, one from a ceramic artist and the other relecting upon the wider role of ceramic studies in contemporary archaeological practice. Analysing materials It seems itting for a volume dedicated to the legacy of one of the foremost proponents of ceramic petrology in archaeological analysis that the irst half of the volume is concerned with sourcing and characterising clays and inclusions. The irst three papers deal with novel applications of the most widely used xxx EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION sourcing method; thin-section petrography. In 1969 David Peacock published a seminal paper in Antiquity that shed new light on Neolithic pottery production in Cornwall. Henrietta Quinnell and Roger Taylor bring this work up to date and place it into a broader context in their paper, which draws upon a large body of research into the prehistoric pottery of south-west Britain. Their utilisation of thin-section petrology generates better understanding of the complexities of the sourcing of raw materials in the Early Neolithic. Their results demonstrate the movement of materials over signiicant distances, which inform discussion of potential social meaning of clays and tempers. Such an approach is more explicitly taken by Imogen Wood in her contribution, which examines the use of gabbroic clay in the early medieval period in Cornwall, a kind of ceramic raw material that has long been associated with David Peacock (1988). Drawing upon contemporary social theory, as well as David Peacock’s work on ethnographic approaches to past potting practices, Wood argues that the use of gabbroic clay was highly symbolic, with it being used to mediate experiences of disruptive social changes, particularly the adoption of Christianity. The contribution by Peter Hommel et al. is innovative in its application of ceramic petrology to the study of early pottery in Eastern Siberia, a type of pottery and a region to which this approach had not been applied previously. The study provides important and exciting new insights into the social dynamics of hunter-gatherer groups through reconstruction of technological choices in pottery production, which has implications for mobility and human-landscape interaction. The use of thin-section analysis continues in the contribution by Ákos Pető and Luc Vrydaghs, who move away from the study of geological inclusions to apply techniques from phytolith research to address the use of vegetal temper in archaeological pottery. Their experimental study provides a framework for better understanding the presence of vegetal inclusions, thus facilitating a more accurate determination of whether organic matter was added to clay or was naturally occurring within it, as well allowing us to be more precise in our identiications of the kinds of inclusions that are frustratingly often referred to simply as ‘organic’ or ‘chaff ’. Two contributions, by Jill Hilditch et al. and Jens Andersen et al., return us to the study of mineralogical inclusions through the application of automated techniques to the characterisation of inclusions within pottery. Hilditch et al. utilised automated scanning electron microscopy in the analysis of pottery from the Bronze Age Aegean, a region in which David Peacock’s inluence has been exceptionally great. Their approach is intended to address a fundamental methodological issue, namely the integration of the analysis of coarse wares (often undertaken using petrological techniques) and ine wares (more typically analysed using chemical techniques). The new approach creates a mineralogical map of the pottery fabric, which can xxxi INSIGHT FROM INNOVATION then be analysed to develop a more layered understanding of manufacturing technologies and the relationships between different types of pottery which are traditionally studied by different specialists, using different techniques. The second application of the same technique, by Andersen et al., focusses on the characterisation of post-medieval pottery from Somerset. Their contribution, like that of Hilditch et al., argues that the technique provides information that can be fruitfully integrated with data from ‘hand-held’ pottery analysis. Richard Jones and Louisa Campbell apply another well-established technique, namely X-Ray diffraction (XRF) analysis, in their examination of the supply of Samian Ware to Roman military sites in Scotland. In recent years XRF analysis has been increasingly accessible to researchers working on archaeological ceramics and other materials due to the affordability of portable XRF machines, which allow quick sampling of archaeological specimens in the ield or in museum archives. Jones and Campbell demonstrate that supplementing typological information on Samian Ware with XRF characterisation has potential not only for understanding the supply of pottery to the Roman army but also for reining the chronological framework for the sampled sites. The technique has the added advantage that, unlike ceramic petrography or chemical techniques which require samples of the material, it is non-destructive. Together this group of papers demonstrate the value of adopting new techniques for the characterisation of ceramic fabrics, as well as the utilisation of existing ones in novel ways. The emerging and enhanced techniques produce more accurate results, which provide greater insight into the technology and social setting of pottery production. Such insights help us address wider archaeological questions about, for example, the social relationships underpinning hunter-gatherer communities, the ways in which people experienced social change in early medieval Cornwall, and how the Roman army in Scotland was supplied. Making and experiencing pottery The second group of papers examine the making of pottery from other angles, considering aspects such as the skill and creativity of potters and the social implications of vessel decoration and size. Two papers also explore how innovative applications of computer visualisation software can open up new lines of enquiry into archaeological ceramics. Yvonne de Rue and Sarah Coxon each explore issues surrounding the making of pottery relating to skill, cultural knowledge and creativity. Fingerprints on pottery have long been discussed as offering potential for understanding the xxxii EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION identity of potters and the scale of pottery production, however there has been little progress in realising this potential. De Rue attempts to address this omission through study of stoneware manufacture in late medieval Germany. Drawing on anthropological analyses of learning patterns and skill, she argues that we can identify communities of practice by studying the ways in which inger impressions are made on pottery, thereby deepening our understanding of the social dynamics of pottery manufacture. The approach is particularly promising for the kind of pottery that is often dismissed as being produced in a homogenising, semi-industrial manner, which is indeed the case for much late medieval pottery. Coxon’s study focusses on a very different set of material: Bronze Age cremation urns from sites in Serbia. Critiquing conventional analyses of style and considering instead the socially embedded nature of pottery production, Coxon presents a radical and innovative account of creativity in pottery manufacture by identifying the unwritten rules which were reproduced in pottery production, but which left spaces open for creative endeavour on the part of potters. Innovative approaches such as this have great potential for allowing us to understand the humans behind pottery manufacture not as automatons reproducing socially prescribed types, but as creative agents with the capacity to innovate and adapt cultural knowledge. Decoration, a key element of both Coxon’s and de Rue’s contributions, is explored further by Jervis, who considers the effect of decoration on medieval pottery. Starting from the position that traditional approaches, which see decoration as relecting cultural norms, are homogenising and inadequate for understanding how designs became meaningful to medieval people, Jervis adopts an approach grounded in non-representational theory which sees decoration as becoming meaningful as pots are drawn into interactions with other objects, people and spaces. Speciically he argues that in different contexts the same type of pottery, Saintonge Polychrome Ware, could be used in the emergence of different forms of identity, with different connotations and meanings emerging from the differing ways in which people experienced and interacted with these vessels. Rebecca Bridgman and Graeme Earl are also concerned with the decoration of pottery, but in this instance how it is displayed, perceived and experienced within modern museum environments. Their contribution explores how polynomial texture mapping (PTM) technology can be used to create visualisations that allow the particular qualities of medieval lustre wares to be experienced without needing to be in the presence of the vessel. As a research tool, PTM technology can aid interpretation of how these vessels would have looked in different settings, for example depending on the intensity, position and colour of lighting. Bridgman and Earl argue that this has particular beneits within the context of museums, where it is not always possible to light objects in a way that adequately demonstrates their xxxiii INSIGHT FROM INNOVATION material qualities, and the effect that these may have had on people in the past. The inal two papers in this set move towards developing a greater understanding of vessel function, particularly in regard to vessel capacity. Matt Brudenell et al. demonstrate how computer visualisations can be used to estimate the capacity of vessels even when they are present only in a fragmentary state. This is a welcome methodological advance, as it has traditionally been dificult to calculate vessel capacities except in the rare instances where complete vessels are recovered. The importance of understanding vessel volumes is well articulated in Joanita Vroom’s contribution, which examines the relationship between pottery form, function, and the social processes of dining in the Byzantine world. Vroom integrates data about vessel form and shape with culinary information gathered from archaeological and historical sources to argue for long-term changes in cooking, dining, and consumption practices. These changes can be related to wider socio-economic changes in the region, which was subject to Byzantine, Islamic and western inluences throughout the medieval period. Vroom concludes that a great deal of information resides in the relationship between pottery production and use, and that the interpretive potential of pottery in relation to wider economic and social questions is best realised by paying closer attention to this relationship. Relecting on pottery The inal two papers take different approaches to archaeological ceramics. The irst is by Helen Marton, a contemporary ceramic artist with personal and professional familiarity with gabbroic clay, so attached in the archaeological mind to the work of David Peacock. Marton’s paper offers a relection on the properties of this clay and the experience of using it. She emphasises the sensory aspects of working with clay and takes a phenomenological approach to the ways in which gabbroic clay has shaped her own work. Marton thereby underlines the importance of paying attention to clay materialities in interpretation of how past potting practices generated identities and meanings. The last paper in the volume, by Jane Evans et al., is a welcome commentary on contemporary practice in archaeological ceramic analysis. Co-authored by specialists in prehistoric, Roman and medieval ceramics who together represent the three primary societies for archaeological ceramic studies in Britain, the contribution relects on how we as archaeologists engage with the ceramic evidence. They also discuss the challenges facing archaeologists working within a commercial environment where time and funds are often tightly constrained. Evans et al. argue that it is necessary to emphasise and articulate the value of ceramic studies to the archaeological process as a whole. This point is strengthened through a summary of an innovative inter-disciplinary research xxxiv EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION project into the material culture of a late medieval household from Southampton, in which excavated evidence was integrated with archival research. The paper concludes with a discussion of how best practice in ceramic studies may be achieved, reviewing existing standards documents and producing a roadmap to a more integrated set of standards which, at the time of writing, is underway. Insight from innovation The papers presented in this volume demonstrate that ceramic studies are one of the frontiers in modern-day archaeology. Developing and utilising new techniques, and inding new uses for old ones, allow us to address long-standing questions and pose new ones, opening further avenues for future research which will deepen and enrich our understanding of past societies across the world and through all periods. As Bridgman and Earl demonstrate, technology also offers exciting possibilities for the display of pottery, emphasising Marton’s point about considering the visual and tactile qualities of clay and ceramic objects. Contributions by Jervis, Coxon, and Wood in particular also emphasise the value of adopting new interpretive frameworks for the wider social implications of the data that we are able to collect from ceramics. Finally several papers explicitly and implicitly demonstrate the need for high standards to be maintained in ceramic studies. This is most evident in the contribution by Evans et al., but is emphasised in particular by Andersen et al. in relation to fabric analysis and by Vroom in relation to the full biographies of pottery. Ceramics need not only be indicators of trade and economic development. It is striking is that a number, if not the majority, of the papers are not concerned with pottery as an end to itself, but rather in its value for understanding wider archaeological questions, whether these relate to early hunter-gatherer communities, cultural inluences in the medieval Mediterranean or the economics of Roman outposts in Scotland. As such, they demonstrate the value of innovation in ceramic studies to archaeology as a whole and, we hope, will inspire researchers to continue to expand and strengthen the use of ceramics to understand the past. We further hope that readers will agree that this collection is a itting tribute to the impact that David Peacock had on ceramic studies. Certainly this impact has been felt in our own work and long may this continue. Acknowledgements We would like to thank everybody who participated in and helped to organise the Insight from Innovation conference, particularly Pina Franco, Alison Gascoigne, Yvonne Marshall, Elaine Morris and Sandy Budden. We are grateful to the sponsors of the conference, notably the University of Southampton, the Prehistoric Ceramics Research Group, the Study Group for Roman Pottery, and the Medieval Pottery Research Group. We also extend our thanks to our xxxv INSIGHT FROM INNOVATION external reviewers, to Andy Jones for advice, and to Lyn and Kat Cutler and the team at Highield Press for invaluable assistance during production of this volume. Last but certainly not least, thank you to Simon Keay and Michael Fulford. Bibliography Peacock, D. 1969. Neolithic Pottery Production in Cornwall. Antiquity 43, 145-9. Peacock, D. 1988. The Gabbroic Pottery of Cornwall. Antiquity 62, 302-4. xxxvi