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Let the bells ring out across the land - Ep 13
564 Plays1 year ago
You may know what a Bell Beaker is, but why is it shaped the way it is and who were the people who made and used them? Find out in this month’s episode, where Matilda talks with expert potter Graham Taylor all about this popular and far-reaching object type. Have you ever wondered why people started making beakers? Who was involved in spreading them throughout Europe? How to create that authentic prehistoric look? No matter whether the answer to these questions is yes or no, tune in to hear everything from reflections on the earliest Mediterranean souvenirs to the origins of the word “pot hole”, and much more in between.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/teabreak/13
Links
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast & Host
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to Tea Break Time Travel, where every month we look at a different archaeological object and take you on a journey into their past.
Episode 13 & Guest Introduction
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to episode 13 of Tea Break Time Travel. I am your host, Matilda Ziebrecht, and today I'm savoring a pina colada tea. The sun's out, so I thought, even though it's only two degrees, why not pretend I'm on a tropical beach and have a lovely pina colada tea. Alcohol free, of course.
00:00:33
Speaker
And joining me on my tea break today is Graham Taylor, who is a professional potter specialising in historic and prehistoric replicas. And you might recognise the name as one of the talents behind the company Potted History. So welcome, Graham. Thank you for joining me. Are you also on tea this morning? I am on tea, although generally I'm a bit of a coffee man, but I think the doctors told me to ease off on that. So I'm gently, gently on tea this morning.
00:00:59
Speaker
Fair enough. Fair enough. I imagine no black tea if you're a coffee person. No, it's actually boring old sort of builder's tea as it were. There you go. Classic as well. We all have to go back to the good old builder's tea every so often.
00:01:17
Speaker
But so, yes, thank you very much for joining me. As I mentioned, you are, of course, one of the main talents behind potted history, which I'm sure people are very aware of. You've created replicas for all kinds of shows and institutions and everything. But I'm curious, were you always interested in the replica side of things?
Graham Taylor's Pottery Journey
00:01:35
Speaker
So prehistory or history, or was it something that developed out of an experience with pottery?
00:01:40
Speaker
Yeah, it really developed right back when I was a student back, but just after Julius Caesar got to Britain, I think it was quite a while ago. Yeah, I was always interested in the fact that as a potter, I was pursuing a craft which had roots which went far into the distant past. I wasn't really aware at that stage of just how far into the distant past that went. But I started to sort of research
00:02:11
Speaker
ancient pottery with a view to utilising some of the things that I learned within my sort of contemporary craft. And that sent me off to reading sort of reports of digs and journals, et cetera. And so often with the archaeological research at that time, I would find myself sitting reading it going, no, that's not right. So it sort of sent me off doing the research myself and doing the experiments that developed from there.
00:02:39
Speaker
I find that really interesting. I've spoken a lot with people, because I work a lot with EXAC, the Experimental Archaeology Society, and I speak a lot with people who had a similar experience, indeed, that they started off as a crafter predominantly, shall we say. So, you know, specialized in a craft or specialized in a technology, and then, indeed, would read archaeological reports and go, they have no idea.
00:02:59
Speaker
idea what they're talking about. Do you see that there's an improvement in that, or is it still quite a divide between people who know the technology and the kind of scholars or academics, shall we say?
Archaeology & Practitioner Dynamics
00:03:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there is in some areas, although there are so many new courses in experimental archaeology, etc., that have come along. There's a greater sort of rapport, if you like, between practitioners and archaeologists these days. And I currently work with quite a lot of archaeologists and, as you know, institutions.
00:03:35
Speaker
that do understand the value of discussing these things. So it's a much better situation than it was when I started off. That's good to know. And I'm curious, when you were doing, for example, training in ceramics in pottery, do you learn indeed the kind of historic techniques as well as part of that training? Or is it something that you have to kind of search out for yourself?
00:03:59
Speaker
Well, certainly when I did, it was very much something you had to search out for yourself. The whole emphasis back in the 1970s really was on the sort of leech tradition of pottery having been brought to, you know, the current sort of craft pottery having been brought to Britain by Bernard Leech, having popped out to Japan to teach them how to do etchings and come back as a potter. It was very much this sort of studio pottery ethos, which
00:04:29
Speaker
Did, to some extent, look back, but not to any huge degree? Oh, very interesting. And speaking about looking back, I mean, we are called Tea Break Time Travel, this podcast.
Bronze Age Pottery Exploration
00:04:40
Speaker
So I, of course, have to ask, if you could travel back in time, where would you go and why?
00:04:46
Speaker
Oh lordy, it is a really interesting question. I do remember listening, I think it was Julian Richards once asked, he being one of the experts on Stonehenge, he was asked how he would feel if he was transported back to Stonehenge at its height and he said he thought he'd probably just stand and laugh at how wrong we'd got it all.
00:05:11
Speaker
this is what I always say at this segment usually I sort of say I'm not sure actually if I'd want to go back because you know what if indeed we were all completely wrong or it's just really boring you know the response and it's like yeah well well this is true I mean I think it would be for me it would be the Bronze Age I love British Neolithic pottery the British certainly British
00:05:33
Speaker
Iron Age pottery deteriorates dramatically, sort of pre-Roman invasion. Bronze Age seems to be this blossoming of creativity, etc. So I think that, you know, Bronze Age would be the place I would want to be and the time I would want to be, although I suspect that any of us heading back to any point in the past, our survival would be probably counted in minutes or hours.
00:05:56
Speaker
Yes, probably. I mean, that's true. I should also I should always add the caveat to this question of, you know, assuming that we won't just die as soon as we can. Yes, as an observer in a little bubble. But yes, I think it is definitely the Bronze Age because you do see the sort of blossoming of people who are obviously exercising some level of
00:06:25
Speaker
their own creativity certainly within sort of the the later bronze age here in britain it's possibly you know we're looking at beaker culture and possibly what one's looking at is very constrained rules in the early very early bronze age but i think it loosens up later on.
00:06:44
Speaker
Okay, that's very interesting. Because indeed, you sort of know, at least I'm remembering back to my good old undergrad days, and the sort of classic stereotype that you learn about the Neolithic is, oh, and this is when pottery started. And you know, this is when we start to see pottery develop and everything. But it's in the Bronze Age, actually, that we start to see the the sort of more stylistic stuff develop, or was that already kind of growing during the Neolithic as well?
00:07:07
Speaker
Not so much in Britain. I mean, you know, we do get sort of what they call Peterborough impressed wares and things like that and then grooved wares. So there is decoration happening happening on the pots and it's developing. It seems to me that what you particularly see in the Bronze Age is connectivity. You see links with the continent and people bringing new ideas into Britain. I mean, really, that's in a way what Beaker's all about.
00:07:35
Speaker
But certainly, you can see the links from where I am in the far north of Britain. We've got influence coming down from what is now Scotland, and that got to Scotland through Ireland, and it may have got to Ireland from the Iberian Peninsula. So, you know, you've got these sort of maritime links, I suppose, that are being illustrated within the pottery.
00:08:00
Speaker
which I always, yeah, we'll talk about this in a little bit, actually, more detail probably, but indeed, I always love that sort of evidence that you have, indeed, that people did actually travel around, because I think so many people assume that people in brief history just kind of stayed in their little place and didn't really go anywhere or interact with other cultures. So I always like, indeed, when you can see something a bit more tangible that shows, actually, no, like this, there was cultural interaction going on.
00:08:26
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I have to say that there is evidence for that before the bronze of each year in Britain. Again, here in the English side of the Scottish borders, but up into the Scottish borders, one of the things that's often found from the Neolithic is jadeite axes.
00:08:47
Speaker
The jadeite from which those axes are made can be traced back to a single valley in the Alps. That's really quite remarkable. Yeah, definitely. People going on holiday to the Alps, hiking trips, picking up some jade, coming back home.
00:09:04
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. That's probably how it happened, right? But great, well, thank you very much for joining me on my tea break today. And before we look in further detail at today's object, let us first journey back to around 2300 BC to southern England, just a stone's throw, excuse the pun, from the towering monument that we now call Stonehenge.
00:09:27
Speaker
It's a cold and overcast day, and yet, as we look around, we can see a group of figures gathered around a nearby clearing, all of them engaged in some kind of activity. One of the figures is kneading together a fist-sized ball of clay, working it into a smooth consistency in expert hands. At some point, the clay begins to take shape,
00:09:45
Speaker
turned around and around between pinching fingers and thumb until it starts to resemble what looks almost like a bell. Once the figure seems satisfied with the shape, they reach into a small pouch at their waist and pull out a flattened piece of bone, which has been carved to resemble a short-toothed comb. Settling down, the figure continues to turn the bell-shaped object on one hand, round and around, using the other to create a continuous dotted decoration with the bone tool, which eventually then winds its way around and down the clay.
00:10:14
Speaker
Once this decoration is complete, the object is put carefully aside to dry, and a fresh ball of clay is taken up in hand. Now, Graham might now tell me that I've got this all completely wrong, but it's in my imagination that I'm allowing myself a bit of artistic license here. So today we are looking at the beaker, more specifically the bell beaker, but we may touch on some other beaker types as well.
Bell Beakers: Uses & Cultural Impact
00:10:35
Speaker
And we'll get into the details soon, but first I always like to have a look at the most asked questions on the internet, courtesy of Google Search Autofill.
00:10:42
Speaker
There weren't actually that many for bell beakers, surprisingly. I thought there would be more. I don't know why, I guess. But the most common one that came up was, what were bell beakers used for? I don't know if you can enlighten us on this at all, Graham.
00:10:54
Speaker
Well, I mean, as the name suggests, Bika, we assume that they're drinking vessels. They seem to be drinking vessels. The lips are sort of formed in a nice way that you can drink from. Of course, most of them we find from burials. So they are sort of involved in Bronze Age funerary practice. And of course, I mean, that's quite important in itself in that it does mark a change in burial practice. We're certainly here in Britain.
00:11:24
Speaker
But yes, I think certainly they are drinking vessels and to judge from things like the Amesbury Archer, where being buried with several of them is going to the afterlife equipped for a party. Which, you know, we all want to know. Take some beakers, it'll save on the, what's it called? The deposit that you need to pay, you know, when you go up to the bar and get the cup, you just take your beaker with you. Absolutely.
00:11:50
Speaker
Okay, excellent. Well, so hopefully, indeed, that will be interesting to see when we travel back in the past to see if they were indeed just drinking vessels. And the second question that came up was, what does bell beaker mean? I'm not sure what this question means, to be honest, but I didn't know I thought it came up a few times. So I thought, I'll include it here. And we'll see if we can come up with something. Well, I think yeah, but I mean, bell beaker is an interesting term. Because to me, they don't really look that much like a bell. But you know,
00:12:19
Speaker
sort of like a bell. I suppose they look like some kind of Tyrolean sort of cowbell or something like that, maybe. But I mean, that is where it comes from. It comes from this idea that these are a particular form of vessel which are bell shaped. And certainly they do mark quite a difference from what goes before them. They're usually more finely made. They are of a size generally, which is, I suppose,
00:12:49
Speaker
Usually about a good litre of beer, I think, if we're thinking that they would... Really? I didn't realise they were that big. Yeah. Well, certainly the ones in Britain are. Oh, makes sense. You look at them and you think, oh, you know, it's a pike pot, but when you start to fill the darn things, they take quite a serious amount. So they're continental in origin. Of course they're using litres.
00:13:16
Speaker
But some of them, quite frankly, the one from Bush Barrow in Wiltshire there, is massive. I mean, they're huge and may well have been intended to be passed around. I spent quite a long time living in Lesotho in southern Africa where sort of the social beer-drinking tradition was to have a very large pot which got passed around everybody in the group. So maybe that was part of the whole thing.
00:13:44
Speaker
But yes, I mean, basically, it means a drinking vessel of the very early Bronze Age, or Chalcolisic, of course, as we've got now, we've got the Copper Age, because they come into Britain, certainly, along with the first metals, and the first metals to arrive here are gold and copper, and only later is it bronze.
00:14:04
Speaker
And indeed, I think Bell Beaker, a lot of people, Bell Beaker is indeed those objects themselves, and those have now been used to define this whole cultural group because I guess they're just so popular amongst this culture, they're so prevalent, shall we say.
00:14:19
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing is that you sort of look at it and you go, this is obviously a cultural thing. But then you look at the distribution across Europe into North Africa. It's sort of patchy. And it's fairly obvious that these people do not all share the same cultural values everywhere. And yet,
00:14:46
Speaker
the beaker is a vital part of their culture. I always say here in Britain, what you see is in areas of power, like Stonehenge, you get burials with very refined grave goods, including very finely made beakers.
00:15:06
Speaker
But when you get sort of further out into the sticks, as it were, what you start to see is people who are definitely being buried to sign on with beaker culture, but often with a very crudely made beaker that's, you know, that they've not got access, perhaps to the finest makers, they're making it themselves or somebody in the house is making it for them. Well, obviously, they're dead, so. Right.
00:15:36
Speaker
but certainly beakers are used as this marker within the grave of being part of, as we said, this culture, and yet it doesn't seem to be homogenous right across the whole area. Interesting, which, yeah, we'll talk about this a little bit more later, I don't want to say too much time off in this first section, but yeah, that's really fascinating because indeed it's such an all-encompassing term, you know, oh yeah, the bell beaker culture, which
00:16:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's like saying, no, they're European, I guess, which nowadays when you're like, what does that mean? Well, and actually, that sort of does cover a little bit the who were the bell beakers. So indeed, they were Europe. Now I'm showing my ignorance of that side of prehistory. As far as I can recall, it was mainly
00:16:29
Speaker
It's mainly Europe. It certainly spans Western Europe across into Central Europe, even down to the north coast of Africa. So, you know, there are connections right across and of course up into touching into Scandinavia. So, yeah. Oh, interesting.
00:16:49
Speaker
So we know a little bit more about bell beakers and the bell beaker culture, but perhaps we can discuss some things in a bit more detail. So we were just talking about this indeed, that it seems that if we would look at just the material culture, shall we say, so the bell beaker, it's very homogenous, it's spread over a large area, but actually you see a lot of diversity. Do you see that in the beakers themselves as well, or are the beakers quite homogenous, according to sort of cultural spread, shall we say?
00:17:18
Speaker
Yes, certainly here in Britain in the very early Bronze Age, or as I say, the Chalcolithic as it's now started to be termed the Copper Age that we have briefly. We're talking around about 2500-2400 BC. What you see initially is beakers which are
00:17:40
Speaker
all what they turn all over corded or all over combed and literally they are a bell beaker which usually from top to bottom has had a line of cord impressed into it repeatedly repeatedly all the way down. It's a really laborious long-winded process. The actual decorating of the darn thing takes an awful lot longer than it does to actually make the vessel.
00:18:06
Speaker
There's sort of this commitment in time. Later on, once we're into the Bronze Age proper, as it were, proper Bronze Age range, then you start to see much more variety developing and sort of more local trends and decorations. I think there have been various attempts to sort of put them into a chronological order, as it were.
00:18:32
Speaker
But again, I'm always slightly dubious and I do feel that what you are seeing, as I said before, there's this sort of blossoming of creativity that people are allowing themselves or their communities are allowing them to experiment a little bit more.
00:18:48
Speaker
The basic form of a drinking vessel with a flared rim and a sort of bulbus base tends to remain. They just extend in length, they breadth and slight variations in the sort of layout of the whole thing.
00:19:03
Speaker
And how did they then, because I'm just trying to remember, frantically remember my material culture course back at uni and looking at different beakers. And so for example, things like the funnel beaker, the corded ware culture and that kind of thing, because they were also with a flared top, were they not? Like what's the difference kind of between bell beakers and other kinds of beakers?
00:19:27
Speaker
Bell beakers tend to be the larger. I think, generally, I have to be honest and say funnel beakers are not my area of expertise, although I have dedicated a couple of them. I haven't done very many. But there does tend to be this absolute standardization within, well, standardization, a level of standardization within.
00:19:52
Speaker
I always think, you know, the memo didn't go out that this year we're having this many rings of cord around the beaker or whatever, which some sort of researchers seem to have tried to impose on them. Yes, I mean, there are differences. It's sort of, I suppose, difficult to verbalise, you might say.
00:20:11
Speaker
Well,
Beaker Decoration & Timeline
00:20:12
Speaker
I do think that there are strong connections between the corded culture, which again comes across from Central Europe before the Bell Beakers, and Funnel Beakers. There are links and whether it's that the sort of whole idea is being disseminated bit by bit by connections, one person to the next, or whether it's actually people moving on is very difficult.
00:20:37
Speaker
Of course, we always talked in Britain about beaker people, beaker people come to Britain, and then it all changed. And it wasn't beaker people coming to Britain, it was just their ideas. It was their ideas and not the people themselves. And then we have the Beakers and Bodies research project a few years ago, which did DNA sampling from bones, from burials, and suddenly was discovered
00:21:00
Speaker
Oh yeah, actually it was bigger people who came here and in fact they seem to pretty much replace most of the native population at that point. I think what it is is it's people moving around and possibly taking ideas with them.
00:21:18
Speaker
Yeah, which then also, as you say, seems to continue a little bit more within the bell beaker period as well, if you see this kind of a bit more diversity and decoration and things like that. I also always find it really interesting. So my own research I was looking at, I do microwave analysis of the last big project I did was needles, for example, bone needles. And even though they may look typologically identical, I mean, it's a needle, you know, there's only so many ways you can make a needle.
00:21:45
Speaker
But if you look at how they were made and how they were used, then actually you could see regional differences between all these areas. So what might on first glance look very homogenous as like a large region is actually, like you say, a bit more detailed if you look at how the sort of microscopic traces. Can you see, I mean, we've talked a bit about the decoration, for example, and you did mention that the form does remain the same, but are there different kind of techniques visible as well to create the final form? Like can you say see different
00:22:14
Speaker
techniques or styles of manufacture, or I'm not sure how you would describe it. No, there are indeed. Actually, your little sort of description before was pretty close. I watched one of your videos beforehand.
00:22:31
Speaker
Well, you might have heard me utter then that one of the terms I don't like is coil building. And so often when you go back to sort of descriptions of how these pots were made, what you find is people talking about coil building. And often you'll get a little illustration of this thing that you did at primary school of putting little sausages of clay on top.
00:22:57
Speaker
And actually, when you go to the beakers, I haven't seen any evidence ever for that technique being used. Yes, coils of clay are added, but they tend to be a much more robust technique in that they're using a larger volume of clay. And as you described, the pots are then pinched out. And what that does is it then produces what appear to be sort of quite wide bands of joined clay within the wall of the pot.
00:23:26
Speaker
which sometimes come apart, and it's often been suggested that they would make a little part of the pot, put it to dry for a while, add more clay, and because they've dried it a little bit too much, it doesn't join very well. Whereas I don't think that's the case. I think the people who made these were skilled enough to make the pot in one go, so they're making a pot, they're adding a little bit more clay.
00:23:50
Speaker
But when your nearest bathroom is several millennia away, you're likely to have slightly greasy hands. And if you have slightly greasy hands, it obstructs the joining of the clay a little bit. The pot will look fine. It'll fire fine. It'll function fine.
00:24:06
Speaker
But when it's broken, it will tend to come apart of these joints. So what we see is we see beakers which are the base bottom end of the beaker is made as a pinched out pinch pot. It's then had two or three coils of clay added to it to build it up and you end up with these quite wide bands.
00:24:22
Speaker
And that's generally the technique that you see fairly widely. It does wear and vary a little bit. And I think, you know, sometimes if I'm making a relatively small beaker, I can do it in one, but from ball of clay, I simply take the ball of clay and I can pinch the whole beaker out from that ball of clay. If I want to go a little bit larger or I want it a little bit finer, then I'll use adding techniques. But of course, what we definitely are is we are before the potter's wheel arrives in this part of the world.
00:24:52
Speaker
If you'd popped down to southern Iraq at around about this time, you'd have found people knocking out pots on potter's wheels, but not in this area. Okay, interesting. And you mentioned sort of the, I'm just thinking, I mean, I'm definitely not a potter. And I, as anyone who's seen my various attempts at making pots, and I even tried to make the Venus of the only vessel you'd say to just fail.
Pottery Challenges & Gender Roles
00:25:20
Speaker
I'm definitely not a potter. My father is. He would be appalled at my attempts. But anyway, I tried to make a little cup for myself because I am the archaeologist. Teacup is my sort of thing. And I thought, Oh, I'll make myself a little teacup. How hard can it be? I thought. And I didn't have a wheel. I tried the pinching method. I tried the coil method. Eventually, I think I stuck with the coil method and it
00:25:40
Speaker
sort of turned out okay. But the pinching method, when I was trying to do it, I just kept getting, it just kept getting wider and wider and wider and wider. I couldn't get that little, you know, neck, shall we say, that the beakers have such that little thing. I mean, is it just a thing? Why do you think they created that shape? Is it something that actually, if you're quite good at potting, that is quite easy to make that shape? Or is it more difficult to make that shape than a general bowl? Like, yeah, how does that work?
00:26:10
Speaker
Well, I mean, strangely enough, it's one of the things that I encounter when I do workshops with people. I always say that clay wants to be a plate. That's what it wants to be. Yes, a broken plate in my case. And your job is to stop it becoming a plate. But yes, there are various techniques in the way you hold the pot while you're working it. And sometimes I'll
00:26:36
Speaker
If I'm working on a bigger pot, I'll pinch with two hands and you're sort of pinching the clay and pushing together at the same time to encourage it in an upward motion to make it get taller and taller. And the sort of exercise I often get people to do is to try and make a tall straight cylinder.
00:26:54
Speaker
And in actual fact, when making these beakers, what I largely do is I don't try and form that shape straight from the start. I actually make what is basically a cylindrical form, and then using my fingers inside the pot, push the form outwards.
00:27:11
Speaker
The interesting thing about that is that when you start to do that, you realize that the reach of your thumb over the rim of the pot, if you've got your fingers inside the pot, your thumb on the outside of the pot, and you start to shape the pot in that way, basically gives you that outward curving flare of the rim. The reach of your fingers inside the pot with your thumb over the top will be almost exactly where the belly of the pot comes.
00:27:39
Speaker
And I do think that that's how it was made. And I do refer to these as reaches. And I think they are sort of ergonomic fossils within the pots. And I suspect if we were to, you know, there's a PhD somewhere in that for somebody to trot off and get as many beakers as they can and try and work out the size of the hands of the people who made these darn things. And maybe we can then start to answer the question, which is often asked, is it men or is it women making these pots?
00:28:06
Speaker
Which relates, indeed, to my next question, which I was going to ask, which is, you know, do we know who is making these pots? Well, we don't. I mean, I said earlier that I spent time in Southern Africa, I was in Lesotho for 20 years. The wonderful thing in Lesotho was that people were still pursuing the ancient craft of pot making, as it had been with them for a couple of thousand years.
00:28:33
Speaker
And it was 100% women who made the pots. Men were not allowed anywhere near the firings, the pot makings, et cetera. I was allowed there as an honorary woman. The reason I got to be an honorary woman was because I already knew about pot making. So I obviously, you know, I was obviously an honorary woman.
00:28:57
Speaker
But it was women's work, making pots. Men didn't make pots. Now, the interesting thing is we're here that we ran a pottery workshop in Lesotho, in which we had about 50% men and women working in the workshop. And the thing was that we used potter's wheels, a machine. And as soon as there was a machine involved, apparently it was fine for men to come and take part. It's a very fair choice, you know.
00:29:26
Speaker
whatever. But certainly, there is a tendency in Sub-Saharan Africa for it to be mostly women that make the pots. As soon as you're north of the Sahara, it starts to blur and you find more men getting involved. And in some places, it's almost exclusively men who make pots. But it's a question which persists. We don't know. We don't really know who's making the pots.
00:29:50
Speaker
And I think attempts have been made to sort of assess fingerprint size and things like that. There was a find from the Nessa Brodgar, an Orkney Neolithic group there a little while ago that had fingerprints in it. And basically, they reckon it's a male of between about 13 and 17. And I have no idea how on earth you come up with that conclusion from the fingerprint.
00:30:20
Speaker
That doesn't sound like, this is what I wanted to be. This is going to be this. You know, you go, yeah, okay.
00:30:29
Speaker
But especially if you say indeed that the bell beakers are generally quite big. They sort of fit my hand when I'm making them, I have to say. And of course, because clay shrinks as it dries by about 10 cent ish, as it dries and is fired, it shrinks. So you have to take that into consideration as well in terms of how big were the hands of the people who made these pots.
00:30:51
Speaker
But yeah, you do get some small ones. Although again, in Britain, it's tended to be said that beaker burials were male burials. There are exceptions that we are now seeing. And I also think that maybe some of the archaeology of the more distant part
00:31:11
Speaker
earlier 20th century and certainly 19th century, sort of dismissed the idea that any of them might be female burials. We've got wonderful things like burials where it's a female warrior, but earlier descriptions suggested that she was the wife of the warrior and that his form disappeared.
00:31:37
Speaker
Yeah, it's like those ones with with two people of the same gender or something, you know, say biological sex in a thing and they go, yes, they were really good friends. Yeah, yeah.
00:31:50
Speaker
One of the burials that we've replicated the pot from is the Ava burial in Caithness, far north, far north of Scotland, and that is a very definite female beaker burial. So, you know, there we go. So the antiquarians just needed to go to Lesotho, apparently, and be told by the people there, no, it's obviously women's work, this.
00:32:10
Speaker
It's related to that a little bit. In terms of the way they're made, you mentioned before something about if they're very finely made or if they're a bit more crudely made. Do you think there would have been people who would have been specialised in making these beakers? Or do you think it was just something that everyone dabbled in at some point? I know this is, by the way, a very big question.
00:32:31
Speaker
I do think that there are specialists at this stage, and I do think that in places of power, and I sort of use that simply because you've got obvious places like Stonehenge, like the Boyne Valley in Ireland, although beakers don't really make it to Ireland in any great way.
00:32:51
Speaker
and Orkney in Scotland, you've got these places that are obviously centres of power. And what you tend to see there is that the grave goods that we do have from those places tend to be of a higher standard. It's not universal and you do find very finely made stuff in quite remote areas.
00:33:14
Speaker
But what you also see here in the northeast of England, for instance, is a lot of the beakers that have been found are quite crudely made. And I think what's happening is you've got the professionals, the experts, the specialists who are creating stuff for places where I suppose they can be retained, as it were,
00:33:37
Speaker
And then on the outside that you've got people who are sort of signing on to pick a culture by creating the pots themselves. Again, you know, going back to my experience in the suit, every woman at marriage age was expected to be able to make a decent pot for the house. Basically, that was the condition of the suit.
00:33:58
Speaker
But in each village, you would have usually a matriarch who was noted for being the person you went to if you wanted the perfect pot. You wanted one for a wedding gift or something like that. And I think that's what you're seeing. You're seeing people who are specialists, not necessarily full-time, 100%. All I do is make pots. But certainly, they appear to have made far more pots than you could possibly need for your own use, as it were.
00:34:25
Speaker
Which I suppose you have similar things now maybe not in terms of making objects but I mean I'm just trying to think like you know professional chefs but then most people know how to cook a decent meal or you know professional drivers but most people know how to drive a car like it's sort of that that idea I guess but in terms of pots.
00:34:45
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. The interesting thing, I suppose, for me, but being in the north of England, is you see this blossoming of the Bronze Age and actually in later Bronze Age here in north of Cumberland, you get wonderful food vessels and things which are heavily influenced, as I say, by what was going on in Ireland and what was going on in Scotland. And then we move forward into the Iron Age and it all just falls apart. It's like, you know,
00:35:12
Speaker
suddenly something else has taken our attention and i think i think it sort of boils down to the sort of things that tested us and people wrote about the about the iron age brits when they got here but basically they will show off so you know it was out with display it was it was clothing it was weaponry it was jewellery it was painting yourself in patterns and running into battle naked these are all things that you're showing off and the pots were something that just that
00:35:40
Speaker
You use them in the house, who cares really? Let's just bash out a pot. Sometimes we sort of imagine that these things are a sort of linear progression of things developing and improving and getting better. It isn't always the case. So yeah, interesting twists and turns in the development of pottery.
00:36:01
Speaker
Yeah, no, fascinating. And I always, I think I spoke a little bit about this in the very first episode, back with Sarah, about indeed how kind of pottery started and everything. But I suppose, yeah, that's also an interesting idea is how it, I mean, not ended, because obviously we still have it, but how it became less of a prestigious thing to do, I suppose. Did it at some point then become that? Or do you think it always, there was still always an underlying importance associated with pottery or? Yeah.
00:36:31
Speaker
I'm tempted to talk a bit about the Iron Age, but what you do see in Iron Age burials in Britain is that maybe there's not a lot going on in terms of high quality native pottery, but they are importing fancy goods from the continent. I'm trying to think if it's the
00:36:52
Speaker
Milton Keynes burial, I think it is, where the grave is full of Roman amphorae, which presumably were full of wine when they went in there. Lots of nice continental pottery and other weaponry, but nothing much that you would say, oh yeah, that was made locally. So again, most stupid he is.
00:37:11
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it remains important, but maybe the skills are not as valued locally or whatever. Yeah, no, no, that's really interesting. So now that we know a little bit more about Bellbeakers and Bellbeaker culture, I mean, no more, as with all of these episodes, basically the final conclusion is that, well, we can try to infer quite a lot, but actually we don't know that much at all about prehistoric cultures.
Public Interest in Pottery Replicas
00:37:40
Speaker
Graham, we did introduce you a little bit in the first section, but maybe we can go into a little more detail now about how your experience relates to this object type or replicas and pottery in general. Do you find, just out of curiosity, when you are doing replicas, for example, or selling replicas or talking about replicas with people, do you mainly have interest from, for example, academics, institutions, those kind of things?
00:38:08
Speaker
Are the general public also still interested in that side of things, kind of the replication process and the history behind the objects?
00:38:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, obviously we make a lot of replicas for institutions, you know, we work for most of the big ones and Sarah and I just spent nine days down at Stonehenge strangely demonstrating Japanese German pottery. Oh, yes. You'll have to go to Stonehenge to find out why. Teasing, teasing.
00:38:43
Speaker
We do a lot of work for institutions, but we also, as you know, we have an online shop and basically we send stuff literally all over the world. And it is the general public. It is collectors and people. We actually sent a Bronze Age beaker to Svalbard not long ago.
00:39:02
Speaker
which is the first time we've sent inside the Arctic Circle, I think I'm not sure. So yes, general public and archaeologists who obviously use them as reference and handling collections and things like that, because of course the general public like to know more about the pots,
00:39:26
Speaker
I've spent a lot of time doing demos and workshops in museums where I'll sit there and I'll make a Bronze Age potter or I'll make a Roman potter or whatever and I'm very aware that the bits of broken pottery in museum cases are maybe not
00:39:42
Speaker
as interesting to the average punter as the flashy gold and jewels and whatever that are in the other case across the other side of the room. They're sort of treated as, you know, a bit of a broken pot, a bit boring. And I've always considered that our job is to stop them being boring, is to bring out the stories of the people who created these pots, the people who use these pots,
00:40:06
Speaker
And to demonstrate, this is the information, this is the life of the average person in that time. You know, when I was at school, it was all kings and queens and lords and ladies and battles. And you went, yeah, that's interesting. But actually, I'm really much more interested in people like me 4000 years ago, as it were.
00:40:29
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. Oh, I'm very much behind that. I'm part of a book club, an archaeology book club, and we try to read books or novels that are sort of set in the past or that are involved with archaeology in some way. And the problem is quite a lot of archaeological, especially the thrillers, I suppose, and that kind of thing, they do indeed focus on that idea that you have like, oh, this is a basic object that, you know, was belonged to a king, or, oh, this is something that will change
00:40:53
Speaker
the history of the Earth as we know it. But actually, there's been a couple of books that we've read that have done so well at showing, indeed, bits of broken pot and being like, oh, and look, you can see here where they, I think it was Murder and Mesopotamia we were reading, actually, by Arthur the Christie. And they were explaining in one paragraph how these bits of pot were fixed together with bitumen or something. And it was really nice to see, oh, this is a popular work of fiction. And it's actually displaying everyday archaeology, like everyday history, you know, which is,
00:41:23
Speaker
I love a pile of shirts. And so often you pick up a shirt and your hand sort of falls into the impression of a thumb or a finger that was made there sort of 4,000 years ago. And that's a very special moment that really sort of goes, yeah, okay, that's a real connection now. And that's the sort of connection that I want to get over to people when I make replicas or when I demonstrate the techniques or whatever like that.
00:41:52
Speaker
Yeah. And it's also fascinating because like you said, I mean, when you first started and right at the beginning of this episode, you know, pottery and ceramics, it is one of these things that has been around for tens of thousands, right? Of years, really, you know, and I mean, yes, of course, the original
00:42:10
Speaker
ceramic objects or the original pots would not have been, I guess, what they are now, because I imagine firing probably took a while to get right. But still, it's one of those things that really can connect us to the past, more so the metal or plastic or technology, other kinds of technology, because it's one of the sort of earliest forms of technology.
00:42:28
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's the earliest synthetic material that we created. It's actually taking a raw material and converting it into something else, which is what we do with clay, because once you get it over about 550 degrees, you've changed it from being clay to being ceramic, and it can never turn back to being clay. Well, not unless it's ground down by another couple of ice ages anyway, then I'd get some of that.
00:42:56
Speaker
But, of course, the earliest ceramic object that we know of is your Venus of Domigesini that you replicated. Which was ground down after being fired.
Authenticity with Wild Clay
00:43:11
Speaker
It came out in pieces.
00:43:14
Speaker
No, but actually, on that subject, I'm curious, when you are working with clays for replicas, because I imagine that also the clay that we get now is not the same as the clay that they would have used in the past. How authentic are you able to get, basically? Or how much working of modern materials do you have to do to try and get close enough to past materials?
00:43:39
Speaker
When it's required and when it's needed for things like experimental archaeology where somebody's wanting to take a pot and try cooking it and look at the residue that's left in that pot to compare it with residues in the past, we will actually use what has become termed wild clay. I just love the idea of wild clay.
00:43:58
Speaker
roaming the wilderness. But yes, we do use natural clays, but we do make so many pots that it would be impossible for us to process all our own clay from sources all over the country, in fact all over the world. So what we do is we buy in, we seem to have
00:44:20
Speaker
the masses of different commercial plays that we bought over time for this project or that project. We then mixing those and often adding back into them the sort of contaminants and the organic materials or the grits and things that would have been in the originals. I often think that
00:44:43
Speaker
the sort of people in Stoke-on-Trent who spend their lives refining clays would weep to see what I do to the clay that they send me so nicely refined. We try to get as close as we can and as a consequence we have buckets full of quartz crystals and calcium shell and flint and things that are all over the workshop so we do have a lot of materials that we have to work with.
00:45:11
Speaker
Okay, and I'm speaking again as a completely ignorant pottery person. So in prehistory, for example, when they needed clay, was it kind of, I mean, they say wild clay, I'm just thinking, was it sort of raw clay gathered from the ground? How would they have worked it? I remember vaguely learning about, not Grogg, that's something with rum. Or is it called Grogg? No, no, Grogg.
00:45:38
Speaker
Where you add in broken bits of old parts or that kind of thing. But how would they have created their clay or where would they have got it from?
00:45:47
Speaker
Well, I think basically most clays that people in the Neolithic or the Bronze Age or the Iron Age would have used would have come from easy walking distance of their settlement. And certainly here in Britain, that's usually not a problem. Basically, most of Britain, there are clay deposits.
00:46:08
Speaker
and certainly in the north here, left behind by the last ice age, and they're usually very near the surface. Modern clays, the clays that we buy, are often mined from quite deep quarries. Most of the clays that they would have used in the past would have been found very close to the surface.
00:46:25
Speaker
And when you're preparing your clay, when you're going to open fire, in other words, you've got to fire your pots in just literally a fire. Again, bonfire firing is a term I don't like. I think most domestic sized pots and beaker type pots could easily be fired in the hearth in the domestic home. You don't have to go outside. I have actually done that in the replica huts at Stonehenge. We've fired in the past.
00:46:52
Speaker
But when you're adding to that clay, to make it suitable for open firing, you need a more open clay. In other words, you need more grit in it. And grog is one of the things you can add. You can crush down your old broken pots and add them back into the clay. That opens the clay up a little bit. And by that, I mean it creates little channels within the clay through which moisture can escape.
00:47:16
Speaker
because when you heat that clay up, you've obviously got what we call the water of plasticity, the stuff that makes the clay moldable. But you've also got chemically combined moisture in the clay molecule. And that chemically combined moisture doesn't leave the clay until about 550 C, at which point it needs to escape. The other thing that really helps with that is organic material. And I think most agricultural communities, Neolithic or Bronze Age,
00:47:43
Speaker
who would have animals that they were driving in and out of their settlements and taking out to graze, etc. As you did that, you would drive those animals through areas where their feet would break the surface and reveal clay. And indeed, by doing that, they would churn it up, mix it up, and of course, they would add a certain amount of extra organic material. It's very nice way of putting it.
00:48:09
Speaker
making a perfect material for making handmade pots. We maybe overthink sometimes the way potters would harvest their clay because they wouldn't have needed huge amounts. They would have needed reasonable amounts. To shunt right forward into the medieval period, we have court records from places like Verwood in Dorset,
00:48:34
Speaker
that record potters being taken to court for digging clay from the King's Highway. If you want to know where we get the term pothole from, there you go. Oh, that's very cool.
00:48:51
Speaker
So apparently they would sort of sneak out at night with a hand cart and just, you know, they'd notice this nice patch of yellow clay being revealed in the middle of the road. Let's go for it. Unfortunately, not the cause of it around here with us anymore, but that would be a much nicer story.
00:49:15
Speaker
Okay, no, but that's yeah, that's very, that's really interesting. So it wasn't that then also kind of makes sense then this, this idea that's always been perpetuated in archaeology of kind of pots emerging around the same time that maybe agriculture was emerging, I guess it's just a natural thing if you're if you're taking your cows out and see some nice clay and think,
00:49:34
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Got some time to kill. Let's try and make something happen. Absolutely. I mean, you do get pottery before agriculture in some places, but not in many. It's true. So it does go sort of hand in hand. Once you settle, then you're in one place and you need pots to store stuff in or cook stuff in. That makes sense.
00:49:53
Speaker
True. Yeah, very true. And going back a little bit to the sort of replication process as well. So you mentioned firing a few times there. So when you fire, I mean, I guess it's similar to what you were saying about the material. So is it in some cases you use the open fire method and sometimes use a kiln? Is it mainly kilns? How does that work?
00:50:14
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the pots we make for the public and for institutions, what they want is something that's fairly robust that you can use in a handling collection, you can let the public pick it up, put it down, etc, etc. And open firing tends to result in something which is relatively fragile. So, yes, when need be, or when we try to, when we demonstrate something, we will do the full open firing technique.
00:50:39
Speaker
But again, we make so many pots that trying to do that with everything would be impossible. So we tend to cheat a little bit. Pots that are required for handling collections will often be fired to a higher temperature to make them strong, so they're resilient and can be handled.
00:51:00
Speaker
and then they'll go through a post-firing to actually give them the coloration, et cetera, that the regions would have had. So they do go through a fire, but in a slightly more controlled way. That's interesting. And do you find that there's a particular kind of object type or vessel or whatever that is particularly popular, either with institutions or with the general public, for example?
Popular Replica Items & Mishaps
00:51:26
Speaker
Your good old Venus of Dolnivius in Italy. She just keeps coming back. But now beakers are particularly popular in terms of vessels certainly and in terms of prehistoric pottery, certainly beakers and things like that. We do make a lot of Roman pottery. I'm not sure I'm allowed to mention the Romans here.
00:51:51
Speaker
We've had, oh, have we had a Roman one yet? Actually, no, I don't think we have, but I have one planned. So we're open to all prehistory. Prehistorians tend to hang garlic around their neck and things.
00:52:05
Speaker
But yeah, we've got a lot of Roman lamps and things like that. And very popular are often the Roman ones, which are not really entirely suitable for family viewing. I can picture them now. So there we go. Fair enough. Humanity never changes.
00:52:28
Speaker
And a final question I had was, what advice would you give to people listening in who are either potters themselves or who are interested in getting into pottery, who have an interest in prehistory, and who would like to try to make replicas or sort of getting into that, not market necessarily, but into that topic, shall we say?
00:52:47
Speaker
Well, I could do a bit of blatant self-promotion and then say, go and have a look at history YouTube. It is a very good YouTube channel, though. Like I say, I was looking through it to try and get inspiration from the time travel segment. And yeah, there's lots of really nice videos on there. So I will be putting the link into the show notes if anyone wants to watch.
00:53:08
Speaker
That's very nice. That'll build up nicely. But no, I mean, basically, you know, there are lots of books out there. I sort of came into pottery at a time when there was limited literature available. But even now, things like Michael Cardew's Pioneer Pottery book, it's a great starting point. It takes you right back to the sort of basics of, you know, digging your clay and preparing your clay and doing that sort of thing.
00:53:37
Speaker
I mean, obviously, you can trot along to an evening class and do pottery that way, but I do think getting down to the nitty gritty of actually how it can be created. And if you live in a reasonably tolerant neighbourhood, you can build your own kiln or firing pit or whatever in your back garden and have a go at the ancient methods.
00:54:01
Speaker
You know, that's the area that excites me and interests me. You know, I started my life making cups and sauces and teapots, you'll be pleased to know. Lots of teapots in stoneware, wood-fired stoneware. But it certainly is, yeah, it's always been sort of look at the ancient techniques, the methods that come to us in the past.
00:54:26
Speaker
Yeah. And I must say, I think that if you want to dabble in experiment archaeology in relation to pottery, it's probably one of the least horrible things you can do for your neighbors, you know, speaking as someone who had to boil seals and stuff. Yeah, just don't do tanning or garum making or anything like that. And I do have friends who do both. So there you go.
00:54:56
Speaker
or even I had one when I was doing my undergrad, I was doing experiments with seaweed in metalworking. And so I had my whole backyard was filled out with seaweed left to dry and it smelled like the seaside, which is lovely if you're by the seaside, but maybe not so nice if you're in suburban Aberdeen.
00:55:17
Speaker
We're just misunderstood, that's all it is. Exactly, exactly. It's a small niche of people who understand when you say, oh, don't use that pot, it had a rat head in it or something.
00:55:33
Speaker
I was doing a workshop to Dublin Uni a little while ago in their experimental archaeology section and I was midway doing a demo and the fire alarm went so we all had to exit and as I left, my hands were covered in clay, there was a bucket of water just outside the door and I decided to delve my hands into it and regretted it deeply. I really did. It had decomposing antler in the bottom of it.
00:56:02
Speaker
Never trust a bucket of water and an experimental archaeology to fall. No, no, absolutely not, no. Well, on that note, on that yummy note, I think that marks the end of today's team break. So it sounds like you have lots to do, so I will let you get back to work. But thank you very much for joining me today, Graeme. I really appreciate you taking the time, and it was lovely to chat with you. It's been a pleasure, Matilda, thank you.
00:56:27
Speaker
And indeed, if anyone wants to find out more about Graham's work at Potted History or Beakers or anything like that, have a look at the show notes. I'll put a
Closing Remarks & Credits
00:56:35
Speaker
bunch of lovely links up on there on the podcast homepage. I hope that you all enjoyed our journey today. See you next month for another episode of Tea Break Time Travel. I hope that you enjoyed our journey today. If you did, make sure to like, follow, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and I'll see you next month for another episode of Tea Break Time Travel.
00:56:55
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.