Medieval pottery tools

It was crafted in Ipswich, Suffolk, a port town near the site of the Sutton Hoo burial. During the seventh and eighth centuries, underwent much expansion and economic growth as a result of its role in the North Sea trading network. It is perhaps because of that growth that a group of Frisian potters were drawn to Ipswich to found a crafting enclave around the year , which produced ceramic wares for approximately one hundred and fifty years.

The wares that the Frisian potters produced were very economically successful, as evidenced by how far they spread across the region. One example of how prevalent these wares became in Anglo-Saxon society can be found at the archaeological site of the West Stow Village. Excavations at West Stow, which was a rural farming community, found that the proportion of potsherds that were from Ipswich wares matched the proportion of potsherds from more local wares.

One of the main things that differentiates Ipswich wares from the traditional Anglo-Saxon wares that predate them are the fact that they were made by specialized and dedicated crafters, rather than farmers who had a broader array of skills and split their labor between a variety of tasks. Additionally, the Frisian potters had better clay and tools at their disposal when crafting the wares, as crafters were often higher status than farmers. Ipswich wares were made using turntables, and were therefore more regular in form than the traditional wares that were created purely by hand.

Additionally, Ipswich wares were fired in kilns, which are more easily controlled than the bonfires used for traditional firing. Overall, the Ipswich ware urns represent a technological advancement in pottery, while also demonstrating that at least one part of Britain had recovered enough from the collapse of the Roman occupation to attract foreign crafters for long periods of time.

The modeling software I used is called Agisoft PhotoScan, which uses a volume of photographs of an object from as many angles as possible to create a three-dimensional model of the object.

The first step was uploading the pictures of the urn into Photoscan into two separate chunks, one of the top and higher angles, and the other of the bottom and lower angles. After that I built dense clouds from the chunks, and a mesh from the dense clouds. At this point, I was confused because I had done all the steps that I should have done, but nothing resembling an Ipswich ware urn had seemed to take shape.

In curiosity, I began to mess with the display to see if there was anything that I was missing. As it turns out, there was.

I was able to create a digital model of the urn, but because of both its remoteness from the center of the monitor and my own lack of experience with the software made it so that I was only able to view it from one angle. Overall, my efforts to digitally reconstruct this urn suffered from my own lack of skill, and from low resolutions of rendering.

This is comparable to how efforts towards physical reconstruction could have suffered lack of skill with the medium of clay, or from inferior tools or materials.

If I had made a physical model, I would have had a very different experience which would have most likely been a more successful one. There is almost more to be learned from failure than from success, so I do not regret attempting the digital reconstruction.

This reconstruction process made me appreciate how difficult it can be to accomplish something that can seem simple and linear, as well as the frustration when a final product does not fulfill its intended function-both experiences that novice potters first learning how to craft Ipswich ware urns surely experienced years ago.

Particularly, my difficulties with viewing the model impressed upon me the importance of viewing your work from multiple angles, and even from a distance if possible, in order to take as much of it into consideration as you can.

Blinkhorn, Paul. Fleming, Robert. London: Penguin Books, West, Stanley. One of the areas our class spent time considering and researching was Anglo-Saxon burial practices. Due to the prevalence of cemeteries in the archaeological record, this is easier than researching clothing for example which tends to disintegrate while in the ground, but it is not without its own issues. The main challenge in understanding burials is deciphering why certain decisions were made. Without a well-maintained written record, archaeologists must infer based on objects that did not decay, such as those made of metal , and what texts have survived such as riddles and epic poems such as Beowulf.

Our group decided to explore burial practices through making by re-creating the burial process of grave 28 at the Little Eriswell cemetery in Suffolk, England. This consisted of making the grave goods and reenacting the procession and burial process at the craft fair.

We were limited, however, by our own skills and experience, as well as time and access to appropriate materials. In order to assemble an exhibit that satisfied our desire to correspond with the materials but still echo an Anglo-Saxon grave, we limited the number of artifacts and substituted some of the metal objects for ones made of wood or clay.

We procured many of our items from the costume department, including glass beads, the bases for our brooches, and a pillowcase to form a bag. Brooches were worn by many Anglo-Saxon women: one on each shoulder and sometimes one in the center of the chest with beads strung between them.

There were different types of brooches, some of which would have indicated higher status than others. There were also regional styles of brooches that could indicate where people were from or whether they had traveled in their lifetime. Some even display influences from cultures outside England itself, indicating contact with continental societies.

We suffered a slight complication in the display of our brooches which stemmed from a misreading of the architectural report from the Eriswell cemetery. The brooch pictured above is a square headed brooch and would usually be placed in the center of the dress. We instead placed a model of a bronze rivet in the center of the chest with a square headed brooch at each shoulder.

In there Eriswell grave, two cruciform brooches would have adorned the shoulders of the dress, keeping the peplos on the body.

See Gale R. More information on brooches can be found here or here. The girdle-hangers were metal key-shaped items discovered hanging from the belts of a few different buried Anglo-Saxon women across Early Medieval England, and likely indicated that they were of high-status. More information on girdle hangers can be found here. They would have been symbols of status due to the specific skills required to cast them. Ours were made of clay like many of the other representations rather than their original bronze.

Due to the need to make inferences about what the dress would have looked like, we are unsure if these clasps were functional parts of a long sleeved dress or merely decorative adornments to a cylindrical gown. More information on wrist clasps can be found here. An excellent example of this re-use can be seen at St. Botolph's in Colchester. The earliest bricks manufactured in England after the Roman period are of 12th century date.

Early examples are known as 'great bricks' because of their size, often over a foot long. East Anglia has some of the earliest brick buildings in the country, partly due to its proximity to the Continent and Dutch influences, and partly as a result of the poor building stone available in the region. Study of CBM can suggest the types of buildings which may have stood on or near an archaeological site. Although in some areas it can be dated quite closely, it was often in use for several centuries before being deposited in the soil, so it is less useful than pottery for providing dates.

Often it was used as hardcore to fill unwanted holes, so it may be deposited in the top layer of much earlier features. Despite this, the study of CBM can be very rewarding in providing information on both site formation processes and local building traditions. Orton, C. Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aylesbury: Shire Publications.

Elsdon, S. Gibson, A. Webster, G. London: Council for British Archaeology. Hurst, J. The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England. McCarthy, M. Leicester: Leicester University Press. London: MPRG. Mellor, M. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum. Draper, J. Lewis, J. Cardiff: National Museum of Wales. Last update September Contents This page What can we learn from broken pottery?

Pottery in archaeology Introduction The following is a basic introduction to pottery in archaeology, focusing particularly on the ceramics of the medieval period. What can we learn from broken pottery?

The study of pottery is an important branch of archaeology. This is because pottery is: durable - it survives when many other materials don't datable - we can use it to provide a date for excavated contexts identifiable - the types of vessels and their origins can provide useful information about trade contacts classifiable - pottery forms and their possible functions can tell us about daily life in the past Small fragments of pottery, known as sherds or potsherds, are collected on most archaeological sites.

Prehistoric and Roman pottery: a brief summary In Britain, pottery was made from the Neolithic New Stone Age period onwards, although some parts of the British Isles were aceramic did not produce pottery at various points in time. Medieval pottery The industry There is a large amount of archaeological evidence for the pottery industry from the Middle Saxon period onwards, in the form of products and production sites. The main requirements of the industry were: raw materials: large supply of clay and sand, some water, and fuel wood.

Pottery by period Early Saxon pottery 5th to 7th century was handmade, often locally produced and fired in clamps or bonfires. Post-medieval pottery From the 16th century, the pottery industry grew in importance and production sites were often owned and run by documented individuals. Other ceramics: building materials The requirements of the ceramic building material CBM industry were similar to that of pottery in the medieval period, but location was sometimes based on single contracts with kilns being sited on the land of the building to be supplied.

Bibliography General: analysis and techniques of study Orton, C. Swan, V. Saxon and Medieval pottery Haslam, J. Kennett, D. Post-Medieval Pottery Draper, J. Ceramic Building Materials Eames, E. London: British Museum. Eames, E. Woodforde, J. They often work with bare feet, maybe to keep their shoes clean and whole but presumably to get a better grip on the flywheel. The Renaissance kick wheel A third type of wheel emerges in the course of the 16th century, for as far as I can trace it down.

The construction is more or less identical to my own modern kick wheel. The oldest depiction known to me is from De la pirotechnia by Vannaccio Biringucci, published in Venice in Here, the kick wheel has a construction built around it that provides a place to sit and a shelf to place tools, clay and finished vessels.

These pictures give a wonderful insight into the daily practice of the medieval and post-medieval potter. But they tell us little about the materials, bearings or construction methods that were used for the wheels. In this experiment, I focused on the construction of the medieval kick wheel. The fundamental difference with the Renaissance wheel is the axle. In the case of the medieval kick wheel, the axle is the only static segment. The wheel head, the spokes and the flywheel are all turning around it image In the Renaissance wheel, the axle is fixed to the flywheel and the wheel head.

They all turn simultaneously: the axle functions as a shaft. The construction around it keeps this whole moving unit centered. I started making sketches with the concept of a static axle in mind. I was curious if it was possible to make the entire wheel of wood. If this would be possible, I argued, it would probably be the cheapest and therefore the preferred design for a medieval potter.

Version 1. It was clear that the wheel needed some improvements. A brief summary of the problems and the solutions can be found in the table below. First of all, the axle was too flexible. The ash that I used turned out to be the wrong type of wood and it was definitely too thin. Compared to ash, oak is more rigid. The first metal part that I added was a brass point on top of the axle with a matching brass plate inside the wheel head. This pin was meant to concentrate all friction on top of the axle on a tiny surface to make the wheel run smoother.

However, the brass point only worked for as long as it lasted: it wore down quickly. One time with moist weather, I could barely move the wheel because the flywheel was pressing onto the axle, while with dry weather, there was too much space between the axle and the wheel for it to run smoothly.

I soaked the turning points in grease to prevent the wood from absorbing moist but this did not solve the problem. They did not only confirm the principle of a static axle but also gave me more insight into the additional steel parts. These parts would take away my problem of the expanding wood and reduce the friction of the wheel.

Said illustrations are cross-sections of the cartwheel-shaped wheel. But since the dynamic principle of these wheels barely differ from the medieval kick wheel, I made all the following changes according to the cross sections in Raerener Steinzeug 1.