British Pottery: The First 3000 Years

First comprehensive account of the sequence, development and use of early prehistoric pottery in over 20 years.

Pottery was at the heart of the ‘Neolithic package’ appearing in Britain with the first farmers around 4000 BC. It arrived as a mature technology and was essential to the new, largely sedentary, lifestyle and economy. It transformed storage and cooking practices, and the earliest ceramics seem to have been essential equipment in the new practice of dairying. The pottery changed over time and, as a result, ceramics have been fundamental to the construction of relative chronologies since the early days of modern archaeology. Even with the development of absolute dating techniques, the role of pottery as a dating tool has not diminished but instead has become refined and more accurate.

But pottery is not just a tool for dating the past – it also represents a facet of prehistoric art and expression. Starting simply, ceramics became arguably the main medium for display, with often complex designs. Simple techniques, motifs and panels are combined to create highly decorated vessels, often of great individuality. The use of inlays, pastes and slips added contrasting colours to these vibrant designs.

By the end of the Neolithic, ceramics became one of the major grave goods of British prehistory, acting as accompaniments to those that warranted formal burial whether by inhumation or cremation. This practice continued throughout the Early Bronze Age to the extents that, lacking contemporary domestic sites, most of the corpora of Early Bronze Age ceramics are largely sepulchral in context. As we increasingly realise that burial rituals may have been varied and complex, so the roles of these ceramics are becoming all the more questioned.

This book traces the 3000 years of ceramic use and development in Britain, charting the changing forms and decorative techniques and the differing and changing roles that pottery played within its contemporary society.

Table of Contents

List of figures and tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction

1. All fired up: Ceramic technology
2. The first 500 years (c. 4000–3500 BC): The arrival of pottery
3. First impressions (3500–3000 BC): The Middle Neolithic
4. In the groove (3000–2500 BC): The Later Neolithic
5. European (re)union (2500–1800 BC): Beakers of the Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age
6. Neolithic renaissance? (c. 2000–1500 BC): The Early Bronze Age
7. Regionality and decline (2000–1000 BC): The Early and Middle Bronze Age
8. Postscript

Bibliography

Alex Gibson has specialised in the study of ceramics for over 40 years and has published books and specialist reports on the topic. He has been Chairman of the Prehistoric Ceramics Research Group and President of the Prehistoric Society and was the winner of the 2022 British Academy Grahame Clark medal for Prehistoric Archaeology. He lectured in Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeology at Bradford until his retirement in 2018.