We’re here in the Neolithic Houses at Stonehenge today and I’m going to be making a replica
of a Neolithic pot called Grooved Ware.
This is the sort of pottery that was made here at the time when Stonehenge was being
built, and I’m going to be trying to do it as close as I possibly can to the original
pot.
And I’m starting with a raw clay.
It needs quite a bit of bashing to get the clay off there, and what I’m going to do
is I’m going to crush this down and I’m going to crush it to a sort of gravelly consistency
so that I can add to this water, and other additives.
Now grog is simply old, fired pots which are then crushed back down and added into the
clay.
But I’m also going to add some quartz.
I’ve crushed the clay down, I’ve got it ready to go.
Add some more of this clay to it, and the grog, and the quartz and then we add water.
And the water will start straight away to break down the clay.
Pottery – the first material that humans changed from a natural form into an artificial
material.
Now the clay is workable and ready to be turned into a pot.
I’m going to tear off a piece, put some spare to one side and start to work this piece
into a round ball of clay.
I’m going to be working on a mat.
Starting off, flattening the clay down, working it outwards to make what is going to be the
base of the pot.
Working up towards the form of the pot I want, which is in this case, is pretty much cylindrical.
A little barrel shaped pot this one really.
I’m going to take some of this clay from down here, tear off a piece and work that
out into, if you like, a sausage of clay.
Quite rough, no rolling things out flat.
Not a lot of flat surfaces around in one of these huts.
So I’m going to start off with a sausage of clay that’s going to be added in to that
pot like that.
This is a bone scraper and what it allows me to do is start to smooth the surface of
the pot.
This is a replica of a piece that was found at Durrington Walls, very close to Stonehenge
here.
As I say, it was almost certainly used as a cooking or brewing pot.
Just neatening the whole thing up.
So what I am doing here is smoothing down the surface.
I’m going to start decorating now and I’m using a piece of antler.
And this I am going to use to start to make the grooves in the pot.
And then we start to add verticals, still using the same tool.
Working grooves into the side of the pot.
We’ll never know what these things meant.
They do rather look like the sort of uprights and horizontals of a post and lintel monument.
I’m now going to move to putting in the infill of these panels.
You can spend several hours infilling the decoration on the pot.
This rather suggests that to the people who made these, the decoration must be important.
That’s the decoration completed.
This pot needs to be set aside now to dry.
And it’s going to have to dry for several days to get rid of all the moisture out of
that clay before it’s committed to the fire.
It’s the fire, the firing, that’s going to turn this wet soggy clay into solid ceramic
pottery that will last in the ground for about 5,000 years until archaeologists come along
and dig it up.
Now this is a pot that has been drying for several days now.
And I’m going to move it into the flames.
The flames are starting to build nicely around the pot now, so it’s warming considerably.
I can feel inside this pot, the heat coming through the bottom.
Okay that pot’s now fully fired and ready to come out of the fire.
I’ve allowed the fire to die down around it and you can see the colouration on the
surface of the pot from the fire, and the fact that this pot is now proper pottery.
And that’s Grooved Ware.