Medieval Ceramics is the journal of the Medieval Pottery Research Group (www.medievalpottery.org.uk). MPRG was founded in 1975 to bring together people with an interest in the pottery vessels that were made, traded, and used in Europe between the end of the Roman period and the 16th century. Its remit has subsequently expanded to included the pottery of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries from both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, as well as post-Roman ceramic building materials.
The Medieval Pottery Research Group has a broad and diverse membership. The membership includes professional and non-professional archaeologists actively engaged in the study of ceramics as well as those with a general interest in ceramics or who are involved with local archaeology/history societies. Institutional members include universities, commercial archaeological field units and local, regional and national museums. The Group has strong overseas representation among its membership, in particular from the European Union and North America.
Contents:
•'Pottery and identity in Saxon Sussex', by Ben Jervis
•'The 'material culture' of monasteries in Liguria between the late middle ages and the early modern age', by Paolo de Vigno
•'The use of wooden vessels in medieval institutions', by Robin Wood
•'A late medieval whiteware from Clarence Street, York', by Alan Vince
•'Normandy Whitewares from Ronaldsons Wharf, Edinburgh', by Alan Vince and Richard Jones
•'The use of ceramics in late medieval and post-medieval monasteries: Data from three sites in eastern Flanders', by Koen de Groote
•'An unexpected 'catch' for the Brixham trawler Cataer', by Phillip Armitage and Kate Armitage
Medieval Ceramics is the journal of the Medieval Pottery Research Group (www.medievalpottery.org.uk). MPRG was founded in 1975 to bring together people with an interest in the pottery vessels that were made, traded, and used in Europe between the end of the Roman period and the 16th century. Its remit has subsequently expanded to included the pottery of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries from both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, as well as post-Roman ceramic building materials.
The Medieval Pottery Research Group has a broad and diverse membership. The membership includes professional and non-professional archaeologists actively engaged in the study of ceramics as well as those with a general interest in ceramics or who are involved with local archaeology/history societies. Institutional members include universities, commercial archaeological field units and local, regional and national museums. The Group has strong overseas representation among its membership, in particular from the European Union and North America.
Contents:
•'Pottery and identity in Saxon Sussex', by Ben Jervis
•'The 'material culture' of monasteries in Liguria between the late middle ages and the early modern age', by Paolo de Vigno
•'The use of wooden vessels in medieval institutions', by Robin Wood
•'A late medieval whiteware from Clarence Street, York', by Alan Vince
•'Normandy Whitewares from Ronaldsons Wharf, Edinburgh', by Alan Vince and Richard Jones
•'The use of ceramics in late medieval and post-medieval monasteries: Data from three sites in eastern Flanders', by Koen de Groote
•'An unexpected 'catch' for the Brixham trawler Cataer', by Phillip Armitage and Kate Armitage
Medieval Ceramics is the journal of the Medieval Pottery Research Group (www.medievalpottery.org.uk). MPRG was founded in 1975 to bring together people with an interest in the pottery vessels that were made, traded, and used in Europe between the end of the Roman period and the 16th century. Its remit has subsequently expanded to included the pottery of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries from both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, as well as post-Roman ceramic building materials.
The Medieval Pottery Research Group has a broad and diverse membership. The membership includes professional and non-professional archaeologists actively engaged in the study of ceramics as well as those with a general interest in ceramics or who are involved with local archaeology/history societies. Institutional members include universities, commercial archaeological field units and local, regional and national museums. The Group has strong overseas representation among its membership, in particular from the European Union and North America.
Contents:
•'Pottery and identity in Saxon Sussex', by Ben Jervis
•'The 'material culture' of monasteries in Liguria between the late middle ages and the early modern age', by Paolo de Vigno
•'The use of wooden vessels in medieval institutions', by Robin Wood
•'A late medieval whiteware from Clarence Street, York', by Alan Vince
•'Normandy Whitewares from Ronaldsons Wharf, Edinburgh', by Alan Vince and Richard Jones
•'The use of ceramics in late medieval and post-medieval monasteries: Data from three sites in eastern Flanders', by Koen de Groote
•'An unexpected 'catch' for the Brixham trawler Cataer', by Phillip Armitage and Kate Armitage
RAMICS MEDIEVAL CERAMICS AL CERAMICS MEDIEVAL CERAMICS MEDIEVA MEDIEVAL CERAMICS MEDIEVAL CERAMICS M RAMICS MEDIEVAL CERAMICS MEDIEVAL CER EVAL CERAMICS MEDIEVAL CERAMICS ME val cera medieval ceramics JOURNAL OF THE MEDIEVAL POTTERY RESEARCH GROUP Volume 29 2005 m e d i e v a l
c e r a m i c s The Medieval Pottery Research Group was founded in 1975 to bring together people with an interest in pottery vessels that were made, traded and used in Europe between the end of the Roman period and the sixteenth century. Its remit has subsequently expanded to include the pottery of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, as well as post-Roman building materials. V o l u m e
2 9
2 0 0 5 medieval ceramics THIS JOURNAL was conceived to meet the need for an annual publication devoted to all aspects of pottery studies from the Early Saxon to the Post-Medieval period, including theoretical, methodological and analytical aspects of pottery research. An annual conference is held (usually in May) and meetings of regional groups take place at more frequent intervals. The Medieval Pottery Research Group has many Continental members whose work overlaps with that of British members. Medieval Ceramics welcomes offers of appropriate articles on all aspects of ceramic research for publication. Notes for contributors are given on page iv. All general correspondence concerned with the Medieval Pottery Research Group should be sent to the Secretary, MPRG, c/o Museum of London Specialist Services, Mortimer Wheeler House, 46 Eagle Wharf Road, London N1 7ED. Membership All applications for membership, subscriptions and orders for Medieval Ceramics should be sent to the Treasurer, MPRG, at the same address. Subscription rates Individual 20 Institutional 25 The Medieval Pottery Research Group is a Registered Charity, No. 1018513. Copyright Individual authors ISSN 1358-2496 Published by The Medieval Pottery Research Group Designed and typeset by Christina Unwin e-mail christina@wave.demon.co.uk Printed by Farquhar and Son Ltd, Perth The cover design shows the excavation of a wooden staved bucket at Kirk Close in Perth (courtesy of SUAT Ltd), an Islamic pottery vessel from off the coast of Devon, England (courtesy of Philip Armitage, Mike Miller, John Maule and Brixham Heritage Museum) and fragments of a terracotta plaquette of the crucied Christ from the Carmelite priory of Aalst (courtesy Koen de Groote). medieval ceramics JOURNAL OF THE MEDIEVAL POTTERY RESEARCH GROUP Volume 29 2005 editor Derek Hall SUAT Ltd assistant editors Chris Jarrett Pre-Construct Archaeology Ltd Stan Cauvain freelance archaeologist Notes for contributors Contributions can be submitted at any time, but main papers, which are subject to peer review, must be received by 31st August for consideration for the volume to be published the following year. Manuscripts should contain a brief summary (100 150 words) for translation into other languages. They should be types or printed on good quality A4 paper, double-spaced and with a good left-hand margin (30 mm). Authors are requested to follow the layout and conventions used in this journal. Three copies of the manuscript with drafts of all artwork and tables should be sent to: The Editor, MPRG, c/o SUAT Ltd, 55 South Methven Street, Perth PH1 5NX. Authors, where feasible, should make every effort to ensure that their contribution comes with some publication grant aid. Proofs will be sent to all authors for checking (not re- writing). Failure to return the proofs by the required date will lead to the editors sending their own corrected proofs to the printer without further reference to the author. Ten free offprints and a pdf version on disc will be supplied to the authors on publication of a paper. All statements and views published in Medieval Ceramics are those of the contributors, and are not the responsibility of the editors or the Medieval Pottery Research Group. Contents Editorial Derek Hall Papers Pottery and identity in Saxon Sussex Ben Jervis The material culture of monasteries in Liguria between the late Middle Ages and the early Modern Age Paolo de Vingo What did medieval people eat from? Robin Wood A late medieval whiteware from Clarence Street, York Alan Vince Normandy whitewares from Ronaldsons Wharf, Leith, Scotland Alan Vince and Richard Jones The use of ceramics in late and post-medieval monasteries Data from three sites in Eastern Flanders Koen De Groote An unexpected catch for the Brixham trawler Catear Philip Armitage and Kate Armitage Reviews David R M Gaimster The historical archaeology of pottery supply and demand in the Lower Rhineland, AD 14001800. BAR International Series 1518 2006 Mark Redknapp Rmy Guadagnin Fosses Valle de LYsieux. Mille ans de production cramique en le-de-France. Volume 2: Catalogue typo-chronologique des productions Duncan Brown Andreas Heege (editor) Topferofen pottery kilns Fours de potiers. Die Erforschung fruhmittelalterlicher bis neuzietlicher Topferofen (620 Jh) in Belgien, den Niederlanden, Deutchland, Osterreich und der Schweiz. Basler Hefte zur Archaologie Volume 4 Derek Hall Kevin Leahy Interrupting the pots. The excavation of Cleatham Anglo-Saxon Cemetery. Council for British Archaeology Paul Blinkhorn Clive Orton The pottery from medieval Novgorod and its region. The archaeology of medieval Novgorod. Volume 1 Duncan Brown News List of officers and council of the group 2005 Accounts for year ending 31 January 2005 Regional Group Reports 2005 Information and notes for contributors vi 1 9 19 21 23 29 43 47 48 49 50 52 56 57 58 60 vi Editorial It is with great pleasure that I welcome all readers to Volume 29 of Medieval Ceramics. This years journal features a couple of papers that examine the relationship between monastic institutions and their pots, a consideration of how past peoples may have used their pottery to reect their sense of identity, and a couple of papers detailing the use of chemical sourcing in attempting to provenance ceramics. We also have another good range of books under review and are on course, I hope, to bring our publication date closer to the date on the cover! I would like to thank my fellow members of the editorial team, Chris Jarrett and Stan Cauvain, and would like to acknowledge the help of Julie Edwards. Finally I would like to thank Christina Unwin for the design and typesetting of this volume and the carefully considered redesign of the front cover, Frederike Hammer and Gwladys Montiel for their German and French paper summaries, and Farquhars of Perth the printers. Derek Hall 2008 Pottery and identity in Saxon Sussex Summary This paper explores the ways in which pottery manufacture served to create and maintain feelings of identity in Saxon Sussex. The concept of identity is outlined before the archaeology of Saxon Sussex is introduced. A practice based approach to pottery Introduction Identity is at the root of much Early Medieval archaeology. One of our main historical sources, Bedes ecclesiastic history, has in many ways set a manifesto for research into ethnic groupings and the movements of Angles, Saxons and Jutes and their amalgamation into the English. Archaeologists have attempted to see these identities represented through objects, looking for example at the movement of specic styles of brooch or cremation urn. As we stand here in the modern climate of archaeology, identity has become something of a buzz word with many inadequate denitions and applications. Still, there is, in many ways, a preoccupation with ethnicity and an almost culture historical view that practice and behaviour is identity. We are coming to realise however that the reality is much more subtle, that practice is a building block of identity yet identity is also a building block of practice. In this paper I shall review some of the current literature on identity creation before discussing this in the context of my study area, Saxon Sussex. The study of identity Identity is the way in which people perceived themselves and were perceived in the past. I would argue that to completely reconstruct this is impossible. All we can ever do is reconstruct the circumstances and relationships which create identity and form our own categorisations through observation. I have not set out looking for any particular scales or types of identity, but entered into the study with an awareness that identity is changing and plural (Conlin Casella and Fowler 2004, 1). The model of identity I am creating here is not a new one, and it draws largely on the structuration theory of the sociologist Anthony Giddens (1979/2002). I also acknowledge that it is a somewhat simplied version of identity construction and that other factors will play a role. We can see practice and time being the key constituents of both identity and the material and Ben Jervis manufacture is then taken to explore the ways in which pottery manufacture caused people to perceive themselves in relation to their landscape, to each other and to pottery. social world in which it is created. Practice is a set of relationships between people, objects and the natural world, governed by factors such as experience and upbringing with no hard and fast naturalistic rules. These practices are carried out through time and thus they act as a medium through which the social environment is built, reconstructed and modied (Gosden 1994, 8). A history of practices is therefore a life history, unique to every person, artefact and landscape. In order for practices to continue they have to be carried out in a material and social environment through time, so in as much as practice can be seen to structure this world, so this world structures practice. Within this world and this concept of biography people perceive and place themselves in relation to objects, people and their landscape through practice. It is this perception which is identity. Material culture is often all we have left of the past and therefore its place within this model needs to be dened. The pot, to take an example, is the result of technological practice. These practices are governed by technical considerations as well as social, political and economic inuences (Dobres 2000, 96). The sequence of pottery manufacture can be broken down into sets of relationships. Some of these are visible archaeologically, some can only be speculated from analogy and some will be highly personal and contextual and thus completely invisible (Gosselain 2000, 248). Once a pot becomes situated in the material and social world it can be seen to be developing an identity resulting from the practices it partakes in. The process of objectication occurs whereby the pot is created by us but at the same creates aspects of us (Miller 2005, 910). To take an example from pottery manufacture, skill can be seen to be creating the vessel, but the act of producing the vessel can be seen to be creating skill (Ingold 2000/2004, 262). Such a viewpoint is untenable because it makes the pot and the person indistinguishable. We have to sink to a lower analytical scale, and see the pot as acting with a person. Objectication therefore becomes the way people in engage with things in order to play out their practices within the constraints of their context. Further 1 * Department of Archaeology . University of Southampton . Avenue Campus . Highfield Road . Southampton . Hampshire bpj106@soton.ac.uk * Ben Jervis 2 meaning is generated through interactions with a pot, the users ideas of function are projected onto the object just as the material properties of the pot informs this perception of function. In this way pots can abstractly at least be seen to be acting to generate and reinforce their place in relation to people and other objects, and thus generate and reproduce their identity. It has been implicit so far that identity cannot be thrust upon the past, nor can it be the initial aim of studying an artefact assemblage. The assemblage itself has no meaning, it is only once it is used to reconstruct the world in which it originally existed and the practices in which it partook that we can begin to ask questions about identity. As identity is highly contextual, we must understand the wider context before studying pottery in depth. Saxon Sussex The modern county of Sussex formed the kingdom of the South Saxons in the Early Saxon period. In the 8th and 9th centuries this kingdom declined to become amalgamated into Mercia and then Wessex. A number of sites are known from Sussex from both the Early and Late Saxon periods. These are largely focussed on the coastal plain and the South Downs (Welch 1983). This may be partly due to a lack of archaeological eldwork in the Weald but is also due in part to this area probably being quite densely wooded. Both cemeteries and settlements match this pattern (Figure 1). The area was divided into formal units. Hundreds existed before Domesday and are probably a 7th9th century phenomenon, however it is possible that they were based on earlier less formal divisions of land (Joliffe 1930). They may have developed out of natural communities with similar interests, bounded perhaps by geographical features. Thus each hundred or group of hundreds would have different interests in terms of maintaining subsistence and the calendar of events for a year would vary greatly (Table 1), naturally causing differences in peoples perception of time and the landscape. The 10th century brought civil defence and thus burhs to Sussex. Chichester, Lewes and Hastings developed as urban centres whilst Burpham and the mysterious Eopburnham remained purely military sites, perhaps supported by the growth of smaller urban centres such as Steyning and Rye. The vast majority of Domesday settlement was located along the coastal plain and the downs. Both rural and urban settlements existed, causing differences is peoples lifestyles and perceptions of their world. Of the rural sites the largest are at Bishopstone and Botolphs in the Ouse and Adur valleys respectively. At Bishopstone, Early and Late Saxon settlements are known. The later settlement is in the valley bottom whereas the earlier settlement is on top of a ridge, inhabited since the Bronze Age. The two settlements are very different, the earlier site on Rookery Hill consists primarily of sunken featured buildings (Bell 1977) whilst the site in the modern day village is a cluster of halls and pits which have been interpreted as being a Minster or Thegns home (Thomas 2005, 9). This is based on the presence of a rare latrine feature, a possible tower and evidence for metalworking. In the Adur valley a rural settlement at Botolphs again uncovered late and early occupation, although it is possible that the site was abandoned in between these two phases. The evidence in terms of buildings is similar and subsistence was based mainly on farming and salt exploitation (Gardiner 1990, 240). Major excavations have taken place in two towns; Steyning (Gardiner 1993) and Chichester (See Down 1989 for the most up to date gazetteer of sites in the city). Both developed into urban centres with mints. Other rural sites are also known, sunken featured buildings have been found at Westhampnett (Chadwick 2006) and North Marden near Chichester (Drewett Figure 1 Location of sites mentioned in the text Copyright Ben Jervis. Drawing Ben Jervis 3 Pottery and identity in Saxon Sussex 1982) and at Old Erringham at the mouth of the Adur (Holden 1976). Small settlements of Early and Late Saxon date are known at Hassocks (Butler 2000) and Pagham (Gregory 1976) and evidence of settlement has also been found at Pevensey (Lyne unpublished). By 1066 the Sussex landscape was heavily managed with communities grouped by their environment as well as political allegiance and no doubt other factors such as religion. This landscape like every person and object in it developed over time with its own biography and had meaning and perceptions endowed upon it. Whilst looking at one class of artefact, pottery, is somewhat restrictive, it is the only artefact commonly occurring on every site and its nature is such that it can be involved in a number of practices related to a number of spheres of interaction. Pottery production and use are also experiential processes involving a number of interactions with the material and the object in which meaning and perception are developed (Ingold 2000/2004, 251), just as they are we analyse an archaeological assemblage (Holtorf, 2002, 60). The pottery from these sites is fairly similar to the untrained eye. The majority of vessels are sagging jars, tempered with int and unevenly red. On closer inspection however the practices behind them are variable. I shall focus here on aspects of manufacture. This is primarily because ceramic use has yet to be consistently studied in the area. The focus is necessarily on the general picture and thus the idiosyncrasies of individual assemblages will not be discussed. Identity through pottery manufacture The pot can be seen as a medium through which a number of practices can be investigated through the signatures which they leave. Not all of the practices which have taken place in the pots biography will be visible and their full implications cannot necessarily be understood. We can begin to reconstruct the role the pot played in the particular social context. The context of manufacture was probably one of household or small workshop production (Hodges 1980, 98). In many cases the dating evidence is sparse and insecure however it seems that the Norman Conquest does not have a major or immediate impact on ceramics. In Chichester the general methods of ceramic manufacture continue into the 12th century although at a different production site (Down 1978, 353). Similar continuity is exhibited in a recent assemblage from Lewes (Luke Barber, pers comm). Resource procurement At all of the sites in Sussex clay and temper were collected locally (Table 2). This is probably related to a need to t in with other economic activities which were probably more important (Arnold 1985, 99108). It is unclear at what time of year resource procurement occurred, although if we assume material from north of the Downs was brought by boat down the rivers Ouse and Adur to Botolphs and Bishopstone it would be reasonable to suggest that these trips may have had a secondary purpose, possibly linked to the movement of iron resources from the Weald or the movement of an agricultural surplus. Local resources were used in both the Early and Late Saxon periods but there were some signicant changes in distinct areas. Whilst in some places new resources were utilised in others they were not. I would suggest that this is potentially linked to a changing relationship with the landscape, at least in the case of Bishopstone (Table 2). Settlement shift may have altered peoples understanding and perception of their landscape through the way they acted within and created it through practice. This may have led to its resources being utilised in a different manner. This may not have been the case, such as at Botolphs, where there was more stability in the position of the settlement (Gardiner 1990, 240). The individuals stable perception of their place in the landscape is perhaps reected in the consistency in the clay resources utilised. The choice was not necessarily governed by utilitarian factors but by a wider understanding of clay in the landscape, brought about through the potters socialisation (cf Blinkhorn 1997, 119). At Chichester there is a further change. In the 8th9th centuries a range of clay resources were used from around the city but the development of the Chapel Street industry in the 10th century caused signicant changes in the pottery production process. The Eocene clays found in the Chichester Channel were exclusively used by potters operating within this industry. On this basis it can be suggested that this resource was controlled. This may have acted to reinforce Chichesters place as an urban Table 1 General outline of activities at three Saxon sites in Sussex based on the archaeological and historical evidence After Gardiner 2003 and Down 1981 Bishopstone (Rookery Hill) Botolphs Chichester hunting of deer hunting of deer weaving (loomweights) f ishing (particularly eel and whiting, also shell fish) ?salt production defensive role (particularly important during spring and summer) agricultural processing (quern stones) administration and mint pottery production pottery production Ben Jervis 4 entity, controlling the surrounding landscape. Access to this controlled resource may also have allowed a particular group of potters to become perceived as full time artisans, rather than part time craftsmen (Jervis 2007). Fashioning During the fashioning of pots the potter has a dialectic relationship with his material, experiencing and reacting to changes to form the object (Ingold 2000/2004, 251). A number of ethnographic studies have demonstrated that the skills required to manipulate the material take a long time to acquire and are heavily linked to the history of the potter and his interactions with pots and other potters (eg Roux 1989). The repertoire of Saxon potters was quite limited, the majority of vessels made were simple sagging jars (Figures 2 and 3). Over time there was a change from inverted and straight rims to more sharply everted rims (Lyne unpub. 386; Gardiner 1990, 246; 252; Bell 1977, 279; Jervis forthcoming). There is also an introduction of the tournette for nishing pottery and these everted rims gradually become squarer (Gardiner 1990, 253). The introduction of the tournette may also have facilitated the production of larger vessels (Jervis 2007). Further variability is exhibited in the assemblage at Chichester where larger vessels such as pitchers were produced as well as large platters (Down 1981, 18491). Pitchers occur in the highest numbers in urban contexts, although are also present at Pevensey and Bishopstone. Their chalk tempered fabric marks them out from the majority of vessels which are tempered with int. Whilst these vessels conform to a wider tradition stretching as far north as the Thames Valley, the purpose of these vessels is unclear. Their presence may however mark some change in consumption practices or the development of a new form of food or drink preparation (cf Down 1981, 190). Both of these vessels types often exhibit pie crusted rims. I would suggest that this change in fashioning practice is primarily related to changes in use practice rather than an increased understanding of clays potential. The pie crusting could be related to a change in the scale of manufacture to a small workshop (Down 1981, 1901) and be an overt statement of individuality by potters working in Chichester. These changes in practice are difcult to interpret. Dramatic changes in forming technique, such as the adoption of the wheel generally occur over long periods of time and are heavily grounded in social relations, particularly learning networks. The changes which occurred here are not hugely dramatic but it is unclear whether they would be noticed or understood by non-potters (Gosselain 2000, 248). Pottery forming techniques were fairly stable and this could be due to the demand being for vessels which were required, but also reproduce, stable patterns of consumption. New forming techniques and forms were only introduced when the requirements for pottery changed, due to changes in use. It is reasonable to suggest that these developments operate on two levels, at the level of wider regional identity based on the supercial but widespread changes in form but also at a more localised level of potting groups based on the gradual change in techniques, the objectication of the develop- ment of potting skills, such as the use of the turntable. Decoration The majority of the pottery is undecorated meaning this most common of indicators of stylistic groups and cultural identities is not fully open to us. Where there is decoration it is focussed on Early Saxon pottery and is primarily in the form of stamps. The motifs of these stamps form part of a decorative network, appearing on other forms of material culture. A tradition of burnishing the exterior and the inside of the rim occurs on Early Saxon and small amount of Late Saxon material from the Adur Valley (Gardiner 1993, 41). Table 2 The primary clay source and its distance from the site for selected sites in Sussex. Italic text indicates thin sectioning has been carried out After Jervis forthcoming a and b, Bell, 1977, Gardiner 1990, Gardiner 1993, Foster 1982, Down and Welch 1990, Chadwick 2006, Surtermeister 1974 site period primary clay source exploited approximate distance from site Bourne Valley (Eastbourne) Late Saxon Weald 2 miles Rookery Hill Early Saxon Weald 10 miles (up river) Bishopstone Late Saxon clay with f lints and London Clay 1 mile Botolphs Early and Late Saxon Weald 5 miles (up river) Steyning Late Saxon Weald 5 miles (up river) Chichester Late Saxon London/ Reading Clay 1 mile and brickearth deposits North Marden Early Saxon London/ Reading Clay 4 miles or on site and Apple Down Cemetery or clay with f lints Westhampnett Early Saxon London/Reading Clay 1 mile or clay with f lints Burpham Late Saxon clay with f lints 1 mile 5 Pottery and identity in Saxon Sussex Figure 2 Examples of Early Saxon Pottery from Botolphs, West Sussex Scale 1:4. Redrawn from Gardiner 1990, figure 18 In West Sussex and into Hampshire stamping continues into the Late Saxon period, possibly due to the inuence of continental imports (Cunliffe 1974). In the east stick- end decoration is more common (Figure 4). The distinct zones of use of these decorative forms may indicate some divide between east and west but the presence of this decorative form in the Adur Valley and at Chichester emphasise that any barrier was permeable and that inuences continued to ow across the coastal plain. Thumb impressions are a Late Saxon development and occur across Sussex. They are most prominent in Chichester and Steyning and may be indicative of particular workshops, or of a desire to identify with potters from other urban centres where similar decoration was used. This may also have acted to create a divide between urban and rural, although thumb impressions are present, albeit in smaller quantities, at rural settlements. Highly visible changes of this type have been dened as being related to the more temporary and situational facets of identity such as economic pressures (Gosselain 2000, 189). Decoration is a strong indicator of the tension between local interaction and wider interaction and control, both with the rest of Southern England and the rest of Sussex. Detailed study of motifs may enable further understandings of these levels of interaction and their longevity. Firing Firing is a crucial practice in pottery manufacture. It is also the result of the most complex system of relational practices. Firing requires an understanding by the potter of the way his materials react to the ring process. The production of the clamp kiln requires interaction between potters and landscapes and other people; picking appropriate fuel, placing the kiln in an appropriate place and so forth. All of the pottery was produced in simple bonre or clamp kilns, one of these has been found in Chichester and is believed to date from the 10th century (see Down 1981, 1901 and Gardiner 1990, 251 for a discussion of date). A signicant change in ring technique occurs, most notably in Chichester but also at Botolphs and to a lesser extent at Bishopstone and Pevensey. This is the introduction of oxidising conditions causing the Figure 3 Examples of Late Saxon pottery from Bishopstone, East Sussex Drawing Penny Copeland Ben Jervis 6 pottery to have an orange or red surface rather than a black one. This practice requires a greater amount of control over ring if it is intentional, or can be the result of a lack of control. It seems to be a purposeful strategy at Chichester where the vast majority of pottery is oxidised (Down 1978, 347). Where it is present in lesser quantities it is unclear why it occurs. It is however a Late Saxon development and as such can be seen to be linked to the introduction of the turntable and a greater amount of skill and effort being placed into pottery manufacture. The development of oxidation at Chichester can be seen separately to the developments elsewhere, with distinct practices causing the development of an increasingly distinctive urban identity, producing pottery distinct from that used in the surrounding area. This may have been appreciated by non-potters but also appreciated in a more personal and, for want of a better phrase, professional manner by potters, making them distinct from the household potters producing reduced wares (see Saunders, 2000 for a more general discussion of this phenomena). Oxidation was quickly adopted at Steyning (Gardiner 2003) but in more rural areas, such as at Bishopstone, it appears to have developed more slowly, re-enforcing the concept of the urban as differentiated from the rural. This change in technical process, linked to an increased level of skill and under- standing, can tentatively be suggested to represent a change in the intended biography of pottery, no longer is it intimately linked to the community which manufactured it, it is made in a workshop for sale and commodisation. Any meaning erodes away and is gradually consumed with new meaning manifesting itself over time (cf Kopytoff 1986, 73). Summary Identities are created and reproduced through the participation of individuals in recurring practices. Only some of the ways people perceive themselves are relevant to pottery manufacture. Resource procurement acted to reproduce peoples perceptions of themselves within a landscape, and to locate themselves and their activities within changing patterns of agricultural and settlement activity. Wider similarity in pottery use practices is illustrated through the wide general homogeneity in pottery form, perhaps suggesting that people perceived others as living in a similar way to them, albeit in a different landscape. The continuity of vessel forms acts to emphasise the way people use material culture in practices which maintain structure their social system, and how this system acts to reproduce the requirements for specic vessels for specic functions. The practices used to produce these vessels may have varied locally but this cannot be perceived from the archaeological record. The use of the turntable may be linked to wider economic pressures requiring larger vessels which was felt over the entire area. The development of oxidation ring may be linked to the development of craft specialisation, through an increasing understanding of the materials behaviour, which possibly also grew out of changing economic conditions, particularly the development of more intensive urban living. It also serves to create a distinction between those living on urban sites and the rural population. Decoration is possibly the most subtle indicator of the tension between localised and wider levels of interaction, both within and between settlements. Conclusions Different practices lead to identity becoming objectied at different levels. Clay procurement can be argued to be deeply embedded in a groups habitus (Bourdieu 1977, 73), its second nature. This in turn allows strategies to become embedded in yearly cycles linked to agriculture Figure 4 Distribution of decorative forms in Sussex After Cunf lif fe 1974 and Barton 1979. Copyright Ben Jervis. Drawing Ben Jervis 7 Pottery and identity in Saxon Sussex and other economic activities. Forming practices relate more intimately to small groups of potters and the reproduction of their learning networks. Supercial changes in form, as with changes in decoration are perhaps more illustrative of the ckle, situational aspects of identity. Firing, like forming, requires a high level of understanding and thus the increasing regularity in ring perhaps suggests the development of more craft specialists, supported by the increasing repertoire of vessels being produced. Ethnoarchaeological work in a number of environments suggest skills such as these develop where craft specialisation is more prevalent (Rice 1991, 268). The fuel resources required for ring also tie it into wider cycles of agriculture and landscape management meaning it to acts to reproduce various inter personal and person/landscape/object relationships and perceptions. Through pottery it can be argued that people generally perceived themselves as members of local and regional communities. These scales are more subtle than this however, linked to practices and interactions which occurred at these scales. The local level is based on communal histories in the landscape, localised practices based on the subsistence strategies and cemented by new formalised groupings. The regional level is perhaps linked to a common heritage, a common way of living and increasing economic and political interactions. These ideas of community are relational in themselves and although practices may be widely seen as signify-ing community, the values attached to them will vary depending upon individual relationships. This is not the whole story of identity. By looking at practice I have shown that different aspects of pottery manufacture relate to different spheres of perception and thus to different levels and scales of identity of both potters and non-potters. These practices both build new identities, cause older ones to dissolve and reproduce present ones. I have merely shown therefore that identity is present at a number of scales, is not static and is plural. It is highly contextual relying on interactions between people and pots but also between people and other items of material culture as well as with the landscape. Acknowlegements This paper began life as an undergraduate dissertation at the University of Exeter supervised by Howard Williams whose support and guidance I am extremely grateful for. I would also like to thank Duncan Brown and Gabor Thomas for the opportunity to work with the Bishopstone material, the staff of Worthing and Chichester museums for allowing access to collections and Mark Gardiner for discussions about the Adur Valley assemblages. Trips to Worthing and Chichester museum were funded by the University of Exeters Fox Lawrence Fund. References Arnold, D, 1985, Ceramic Theory and Social Process, Cambridge University Press. Barton, K, 1979, Medieval Sussex Pottery, Philimore Bell, M, 1977, Excavations at Bishopstone, Sussex, Sussex Archaeol Coll 115. Blinkhorn, P, 1997, Habitus, Social Identity and Anglo- Saxon Pottery, in Blinkhorn, P and Cumberpatch, C (eds), Not So Much a Pot as a Way of Life, Oxbow 113124. Bourdieu, P, 1972, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press. Chadwick, A 2006, Bronze Age Burials and Settlement and an Anglo-Saxon Settlement at Claypit Lane, Westhampnett, West Sussex in Sussex Archaeol Coll 144, 750. Conlin Casella, E and Fowler, C, 2004, The Archaeology of Plural and Changing Identities: Beyond Identi- cation, Springer. Cunliffe, B, 1974, Some Late Saxon Stamped Pottery from Southern England, in Evison, V, Hodges, H and Hurst, J (eds),Medieval Pottery From Excavations: Studies Presented to Gerald Clough Dunning, With a Bibliography of His Work, London: John Baker, 127 36. Dobres, M, 2000, Technology and Social Agency, Blackwell. Down, A, 1978, Chichester Excavations 3, Phillimore. Down, A, 1981, Chichester Excavations 5, Phillimore. Down, A and Magilton, J, 1993, Chichester Excavations 8, Phillimore. Drewett, P, 1986, The Excavation of a Saxon Sunken Building at North Marden, West Sussex. Sussex Archaeol Coll 124, 109119. Gardiner, M, 1990, Excavations at Botolphs, Sussex. Archaeological Journal 147 21675. Gardiner, M, 1993, The Excavation of a Late Anglo- Saxon Settlement at Market Field Steyning, 19889. SAC 131, 2168. Gardiner, M, 2003, Economy and Landscape chage in Post-Roman and Early Medieval Sussex, 4501175, in Rudling, D (ed), The Archaeology of Sussex to AD 2000, Heritage, 15160. Giddens, A, 1979/2002, Agency, Structure, in Calhoun, C, Gerteis, J, Indermoten, V, Moody, J and Pfaff, S (eds), Contemporary Social Theory, Blackwell, 23243. Gosden, C, 1994, Social Being and Time, Blackwell. Gosselain, O, 2000, Materializing Identities: An African Perspective. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 7(3), 187217. Gregory, V 1976, Excavations at Becketts Barn Pagham 1974. Sussex Archaeol Coll 114, 20717. Hodges, R, 1980, Potters, Pottery and Marketing AD 700100. Sussex Archaeol Coll 118, 95104. Holtorf, C, 2002, Notes on the Life History of a Pot Sherd. Journal of Material Culture 7, 4971. Ben Jervis 8 Ingold, T, 2000/2004, Making Culture and Weaving the World, in Buchli, V, Material Culture Volume 3 (1), Routledge, 24564. Jervis, B, 2007, Making Pots, Making Identities in a Late Saxon Town: An Analysis of the Late Saxon Pottery from Chichester, Unpublished MA Dissertation (University of Southampton). Jervis, B (a), Forthcoming, The Pottery in Thomas, G (ed) Excavations at Bishopstone, CBA Research Report. Jervis, B, 2007, Saxon and Early Medieval Pottery, in Allen, M, Evidence of the Prehistoric and Medieval Environment of Old Town Eastbourne: Studies of Hillwash in the Bourne Valley, Star Brewery Site. Sussex Archaeol Coll 145. Joliffe, J, 1930, The Domesday Hidation of Sussex and the Rapes. English Historical Review XLV, 42735. Kopytoff, I, 1986, The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process, in Appadurai, A (ed), The Social Life of Things, Cambridge University Press 6491. Lyne, M, 2000, The Pottery, in Butler, C, 2000, Saxon Settlement and Earlier Remains at Friars Oak, Hassocks, BAR 295, 2326 Lyne, M, Excavations at Pevensey Castle, 193664, Unpublished report in Barbican House Library, Lewes. Miller, D, 2005, Introduction to Materiality, in Miller, D (ed), Materiality, Berg, 152. Rice, P, 1991, Specialization, Standardization and Diversity: A Retrospective, in Bishop, R and Lange, F (eds), The Ceramic Legacy of Anna O Shepard, University Press of Colorado, 25780. Roux, V, 1989, The Potters Wheel: Craft Specialization and Technical Competence, New Delhi: Oxford and IBH Publishing. Saunders, T, 2000, Class, Space and Feudal Identities in Early Medieval England, in Frazer, W and Tyrell, A, Social Identity in Early Medieval England, Leicester University Press, 20932. Surtermeister, H, 1976, Burpham: A Settlement Site Within Saxon Defences. Sussex Archaeol Coll 114, 194206. Welch, M, 1983. Early Anglo-Saxon Sussex. British Archaeological Reports 112. Zusammenfassung Diese Arbeit erforscht die Wege, in denen Tpferwaren- herstellung dazu diente, im schsischen Sussex Gefhle der Identitt zu schaffen und zu unterhalten. Das Konzept der Identitt wird skizziert bevor die Archologie im schsischen Sussex vorgestellt wird. Eine auf der Praxis beruhende Annherung an Tpferwarenher- stellung soll dann die Wege erforschen, in denen die Tpferwarenherstellung die Menschen dazu anhielt, sich selber in Beziehung zur Landschaft, zueinander und zur Tpferware zu verstehen. Rsum Cet article explore les moyens par lesquels la production de poterie a permis de crer et de maintenir un sentiment didentit en Sussex Saxon. Cet article passe brivement en revue le concept didentit et prsente une introduction gnrale sur larchologie du Sussex Saxon. Une approche pratique des mcanismes de production de cramique est propose afin dexplorer comment cette production a pu inuencer la manire dont les hommes se percevaient les uns les autres et apprhendaient leur environnement et la cramique. Conventual pottery in Sarzana (eastern Liguria) between the Middle Ages and the early Modern age A comparison between documentary and archaeological sources Summary In Liguria, the archaeological methodology applied in the excavation of monastery sites, both male and female, poses significant problems involving integration and comparison within what is certainly a more complex framework that emerges from the documentary sources. Obviously, these sources refer to specific meanings for particular objects and, at the same time, describe the presence of entire categories of products that, for preservation reasons, are rarely or never included in the excavation documentation. The analysis of the objects Introduction The pottery presented in this contribution represents the most numerous type of manufactured objects coming from the excavations in Sarzana, a town located in the extreme eastern part of Liguria (Figure 1), from Piazza Garibaldi, Via Mazzini (Figure 2) and adjacent streets (Frondoni et al 2000, 107108), an area occupied in medieval times by the convent of S. Domenico and later by that of the Franciscan nuns of St Chiara (de Vingo 2001, 183184). The materials are in an excellent state of preservation, even if fragmented. Owing to the quality of the nds, the nature of their context and the methodology adopted during the excavation, the materials can be analysed while focusing on various objectives: to improve the chronology of conventual pottery, to analyse its circulation in a Ligurian town of medium size and importance, and to understand the ways in which a specic social nucleus received supplies during a very complex historical-political period. This last aspect is of particular importance because it enables us to delve even further into those mechanisms and economic-cultural processes that would seem to dene the material culture of the monastic communities, both male and female and, naturally, to compare them. This will gradually lead us away from what is essentially or exclusively a taxonomic approach and permit us to reconstruct signicant relationships between the consumption of pottery and its socio- economic contexts. However, owing to the incomplete nature of the excavations and the discovery of a relatively small quantity of material, we cannot reach Paolo de Vingo providing evidence of the communal behaviour in relation to usage and individual ownership of the material culture, so elaborate from written sources, must be limited solely to ceramic pieces. In this paper the author intends on examining such materials in order to reconstruct the economic trends in the religious communities, to determine the supply sources and therefore, through pottery objects, to propose a social and not just an archaeological interpretation of the religious context. 9 * SAAST Department . University of Turin * Figure 1 Western Liguria, showing the location of Sarzana on the margins of the Ligurian territory those absolute and quantitative conclusions that have been hypothesised instead by the documentary sources but cannot be veried directly on the basis of our current knowledge. In recent years in the archaeological literature, and in pottery studies in general, the denitions of conventual or monastic pottery have appeared together with that of religious pottery, but in a sporadic and less distinctive manner. These denitions indicate all the pottery items that because of formal components or decorative motifs or owing to the location of the nds can be linked directly to convents or monasteries. The potential of this vocabulary is however rather vague and at times imprecise, and in any case has been used to dene categories of products that are often quite diverse. On the basis of these considerations it will be necessary, therefore, to elucidate what exactly is intended by this denition, whether its usage has been more or less improper, and when and under what circumstances it might still be useful to employ the term conventual pottery (Gelichi 1998, 107). The rst use of the term is the traditional one, ie to indicate manufactured objects that document religious subjects through diverse iconography. The presence of decorations that refer to the themes of the Passion or to depictions of saints and others who have been beatied does not appear to dene specic social environments, not even after 1500, a period that underwent a generalised religiousization of the motifs on majolica and grafta pottery (Nepoti 1991, 139). Moreover, pottery acquired by monasteries and convents was not always and not everywhere decorated with religious subjects, just like the secular use of recipients decorated with iconography of an ecclesiastical nature also should not be excluded. Therefore, the iconographical component, however important it may be, does not seem to be able to exclusively dene a category of products in terms of their use in the social sphere. A second use of the denition refers to the location of the nds: the provenance, and often a certain homogeneity (Farris 1968, 267), would distinguish them as conventual. In any event, it is easy to understand how in this case the use of the term is improper or rather vague, and completely ineffectual in characterising the recipients in any specic manner. If instead we intend on who commissioned the pieces, i.e. containers specically ordered by a religious institution (Soave et al 1982, 115), Pottery in convents and conventual pottery An introduction 10 Paulo de Vingo Figure 2 Map of Sarzana, indicating the two excavations carried out in 2001, 1 the convent of St Domenico and 2 the monastery of the Clarisse then we must explain how the phenomenon is linked to secular realms and vice versa how it is not always present in ecclesiastical areas. This occurs rather frequently in those cases involving objects found without any particular markings that might indicate ownership or possession, such as monograms, family crests or coats of arms. A third possible use of this terminology can be linked to a specic class of products. This refers to the use proposed by Tiziano Mannoni (Mannoni 1975, types 7172, 9697) for a particular category of grafta pottery, until recently dened as pavesi (Mannoni 1968), that because of its particular decorations but it is important to recall that most of the subjects are of a religious character and, obviously, because these types are so frequently found within monastic environments, have been redened using this term (Gelichi 1998, 108). In this case it is important to note the lack of a single provenance or distribution, as well as the absence of a homogeneity in terms of the objects style: the objects, in fact, were produced and distributed in Pavia (Nepoti 1978, 185 188) and more generally throughout Lombardy (Nepoti 1978, 188) and in Liguria (Mannoni 1975, 9697; 53 54; Gardini et al 1994, 5354), where it is not even clear whether they should be considered exclusively as imports. There is little doubt therefore that the conventual pottery category, regardless of the signicance that has been attributed to it, does not dene a homogeneous product class in an unequivocal manner: consequently, it seems rather futile to dene a very specic pottery group such as that of the grafta pavesi. Hence, it might be more useful to attempt to trace the channels that, over the centuries, have characterised the monastic supply lines. Perhaps we will not be able to use a term that has become familiar to us, but at least it may be possible to begin to reconstruct a phenomenon that is much more complex than what might have been expected. Its obvious that cenobies have particular needs for which supply models will be different than those in secular contexts. If anything, because of the numbers involved, when switching from the generalised use of individual wood recipients to those in ceramic, the quantity of individual objects that had to be acquired notably increased within a short period of time. An initial problem, that for the moment we are unable to resolve, is to determine exactly when this transition phase occurred. Toward the mid 14th century, for example, there are very few pottery bowl items recorded in the expense registers of San Domenico, an important convent in Savona (while there is still a large number of wooden bowls). Furthermore, open forms amongst the materials found in the excavations of the cemetery at the same convent in the St Domenico district (Ramagli et al 1999, 222) are also rather rare. In the same period another convent, Saint Francis of Assisi, certainly no less committed to the vows of poverty, offers, according to the same type of documentation, what are certainly more signicant data regarding the purchase of individual pottery products (Blake 1981, 3031). It is therefore evident how other motives, more cultural by nature or involving a simplication of the supply methods rather than what is strictly a religious content, piloted and inuenced the behaviour models which, in the initial phase, were the same as those utilised by the secular community. It seems, however, that only from the last quarter of the 14th century the number of individual pottery recipients increased in convents as well, as is indicated, amongst other things, by the nds from the convent of San Domenico in Bologna (Gelichi 1987; Gelichi 1998, 108), or in Liguria from St Margherita in Carignano (Milanese 1985, 120) and St Silvestro, both in Genoa (Pringle 1977, 126130). The pottery found at the monastic or conventual complexes of the 14th and a good part of the 15th century does not seem to have particularly distinctive formal or gurative features; the reference markets for quality coated wares (glazed, enamelled, engobed) would seem basically to be those of the various secular communities, with a single difference that generated very important consequences at a quantitative and often a qualitative level. In fact, it is evident that when the production of pottery bowls was authorised, products with similar forms and dimensions were purchased on a large scale. A second problem is the lack of documentary sources that would allow us to refer to commissions. In fact, even if they existed, we would not have resolved anything of importance because, despite having this interesting fact at our disposal, we would still not have any additional or more precise information about the characteristics of individual pottery objects. To have documented instead the morphology and dimensions of every recipient ordered and purchased, which obviously vary according to the different production areas, would permit us to evaluate the number of individual typologies and their standardisation, comparing sequences of chronologically homogeneous nds from convents. Based on our current state of knowledge, it would seem irrefutable that grafta pavesi appeared in the second half of the 15th century. Dened as conventual grafti, these standardised products also had austere and simple iconography and, in some cases, a strong religious element. These factors would seem to exclude a specic type of user (Gelichi 1998, 108109). In Tuscany, an initial phase of marking with signs of ownership engraved after ring under the base of the container, and homogeneous consignments of recipients featuring the monogram of the relevant convent took place immediately prior to this period: Im referring to the monastery of St Maria in Siena, where pottery with these characteristics already appeared in the rst half of the 15th century (Francovich 1982, 276322). 11 Conventual pottery in Sarzana In Genoa, small hemispherical or carinated cups with disc bases and double opposing vertical handles, subdivided in two types based upon distinct decorative styles, were unearthed amongst the materials from the convent of St Silvestro. The rst iconographical subject, identied as the crucix type, presents the symbols of the Passion of Christ and has been dated to the second half of the 15th century, although it might also come from a slightly earlier period (Pringle 1977, 126128). In both the examples proposed it should be emphasised that this is in reference to womens monastic settlements. From this moment on not only were recipients with religious symbols and emblems of the relevant convent appearing with increasing frequency throughout the peninsula, but also products with monograms of owner- ship, family crests and, in numerous cases, complete names. The diffusion of products witha high degree of personalisation, therefore clearly carried out on commission, does not imply that we must exclude all other types of supplies, that can be considered as a more anonymous category of products, that nonetheless were also subject to marking or signing (Gelichi 1998, 109). This phenomenon needs to be examined more thoroughly, and not necessarily solely in order to recognise, as is possible, the result of a profound ideological and religious transformation that must have inuenced even the most marginal aspects of the material culture of the period in discussion. It is not only a question of investigating the eventual conventuality of certain pottery as much as under- standing if there were diversied mechanisms that inuenced the composition of the furnishings of the different communities: an initial and fundamental level of comparison should be carried out between the mens and womens institutions. At this point it might be possible to verify if the phenomenon developed in different directions, also because it must be considered in relation to the most secular forms relating to the composition of dowries (Gelichi 1998, 109). A fundamental factor in the economic life of the monastery and its interaction with the social fabric in which it was inserted consisted of the institution of the dowry, i.e. the amount in money or in equivalent goods that the family or other private individuals were obliged to pay to the convent to cover the costs of maintaining the novice and eventually the future nun. It should be remembered that the cost was quite low, and that it was a small sum compared to that necessary for a wedding, the reason for which it became a convenient, and conventional, choice for parents who didnt wish to subdivide the familys property owing to the marriage of their daughters (Zarri 1986). The perverse element ]of this mechanism was acknowledged on diverse occasions by the religious authorities and achieved its most extreme expression, in human and personal terms, between the late Middle Ages and the early Modern Age, when enrolment in the convents was normal also for girls with relatives already installed as nuns. The dowries contemplated various types of emolu- ments to maintain the woman who would become a nun. In addition to cash, it was also expected that the family would provide a set of furniture that could vary notably in size. In the course of the 16th century, also due to the economic reconstruction necessitated by the tridentine normatives against the poverty of the nuns and the desire to make monasteries economically self- sufcient, the dowry price was notably increased, to the point that it was very difcult to undertake the monastic life for those without substantial nancial backing. In the documentary sources relative to the monastery of the Clarisse in Sarzana, starting from the mid 1500s, the dowry was increased from ve hundred to a thousand lire to sums of between four to six thousand lire in the mid 1600s. The women welcomed into the convents with various levels of insertion came from families of diverse social standing, but in general in those urban institutions of greater prestige the relatives of the richest families entered at the highest levels. This difference in economic means is often reected in the extraordinary quantity of objects that might be needed in everyday life often conducted at a qualitatively high level which were consequently included in the dowry. And yet, under the inuence of the council of Trento, the prescriptions of the late fteen hundreds envisaged a truly minimal number of personal objects, which focused almost exclusively on bed sheets and the personal clothing essential for hygienic reasons. Everything that was forbidden money, gifts, vegetable or animal products was placed in the communal coffers, with the single exception of the things necessary for the cell. However, the real situation implied by the dowry lists is often much richer and extensive than what might have been expected. Even though the expression things necessary for the cell remained rather imprecise, the infractions must have been very frequent and quite signicant. Besides pictures and other devotional objects, this denition included furniture and handicraft tools, in particular cloth and all that was needed for sewing, a very common activity amongst the nuns. Certainly less essential were ne clothes and jewellery, cutlery made of precious metals and various undened extravagances. In any case, it is difcult to assess what might have been the real value of the dowry lists and in particular of those very numerous examples dating from the rst half of the 17th century considered a primary source for understanding the true entity of these patrimonies. This is because they seem to lack generalised information regarding what the nuns in the convents owned, apart from some interesting exceptions. For example, in one of the few complete nancial balances carried out inside a monastic community, the property of all the nuns of the Clarisse convent 12 Paulo de Vingo Dowries in womens monasteries between the 16th and 17th centuries these two components are perfectly harmonised. The technical interpretation of these objects and their potential stylistic comparison, that should permit a specic and non-generalised chronological analysis, can be found directly in Liguria, where this type of pottery is very common, and not only in Genoa, in the monastery of St Maria in Passione (Gardini et al 1982, 66) and of St Margherita in Carignano (Milanese 1985, 46), in SS Concezione (Farris et al 1971, 130131) and in that of the Santissima Annunziata in Levanto (Gardini 1993, 143144). Such pottery is also found in the urban centres of the adjacent western Liguria, in Albisola (Bernat et al 1986, 133137), in Savona (Ramagli 1996, 60) and in Albenga (Gardini et al 1994, 53). It can be suggested that the initial production phase began in the second half of the 1400s, based on the dates that emerged from an analysis of the materials found in the excavations of the church of St Silvestro, on the castle hill of the Ligurian provincial capital (Gardini et al 1997, 309) and in contexts immediately following the foundation of the womens Dominican monastery of the Corpo di Cristo (Benente et al 1994, 53), the building that from 1452 replaced the previous Episcopal residence (Gardini 1996, 167). The icono- graphical repertory is rather varied and reproduces, using both simple and complex compositions, the traditional elements of the Christian faith, often with a deliberately symbolic intention, in which references to episodes of the New Testament are quite evident. In fact a basic motif appears, that of the centrally placed cross, reproduced on bowls, cups, hemispherical cups and drinking asks with a spherical body, in all possible variations: surmounted by a Christian ornamental inscription and accompanied by three nails symbols of the Passion; with the base of the cross resting on three bridges that represent the Calvary; with the insertion of the crown of thorns, drops of blood gushing from the side arms of the cross, a stylised skull at the base of the cross, a ladder symbolising the deposition and nally a chalice surmounted by the Host (Pringle 1977, 126128; Benente et al. 1994, 5455). Amongst the materials from St Silvestro in Genoa the depictions of men and women are less frequent (Pringle 1977, 128131) and, in any case, are not casual nds. While the preceding decorative themes, without diminishing their quality, are not to be linked to specic types of production, because they were distinctive of the generalised purchases by institutes and religious organisations, the representation of the complete gure of personages corresponds to much more precise criteria and intentions. In fact, they depict founders of orders and therefore do not have a symbolic value, but a much deeper signicance, because they conveyed descent and memory and would have had a much more dynamic effect upon communal life: in this sense they were carriers of ideas and subject matter. One of these pottery pieces decorated with a female iconographic motif, comes from the collective burial in a crypt of the church of St Silvestro, and is to be considered a personal Conventual pottery in Sarzana 13 in Sarzana was registered in 1570. The nuns waived their rights to said property but requested to retain the right to use it in order to provide for their daily needs. From all this it appears evident that the retained effects consisted mainly of what was strictly necessary to live in a dignied manner, except for a few cases of manifest wealth. The nuns had at their disposal clothing, bed- sheets, furniture, metal cauldrons for cooking food or for washing garments, lanterns, rosaries and holy books, rarely paintings or products of high artistic quality, while personal plates, cutlery or cooking implements are never mentioned. This situation seems to only partially match other documented cases that are never based upon such extensive documentation of the available assets in particular with regard to the poverty or the scarce consideration for the table service. It is a fact that can probably be attributed to the precociousness of the form that was previously seen, under the initial impulse of the conciliatory years. We should also not ignore the differences between the various convents that attracted women belonging to very different social strata. In the second half of the seventeenth century the nuns in Sarzana also seemed to have an internal economy reduced to the most essential items, in which debts were established only with the coppersmith, the lantern maker, the tinker and the vase maker, to remain within the sphere of estimated costs for non-food items. This leaves us with an image of their daily life in which there was room only for the most essential things, a situation probably falsied by the different methods of purchasing other items, including pottery. The pottery The pottery items presented in this paper consist of two bowls made in tawny monochrome, without variations in colour shades, with a compact and uniform earthen- ware glaze decorated with double engravings on the surfaces: internally with distinct human gures, in a full prole, depicting two individuals, one male the other female, both portrayed in religious habits, and externally with a kind of motif of equidistant radial lines originating from the upper prole of the disc base. On the basis of iconographical comparisons, the two personages (Figure 3) can be provisionally identied as St Domenico and St Chiara (de Vingo 2001, 183184). In fact, in Sarzana it is no coincidence that from the beginning of the 1300s two different religious settle- ments appear, traceable to those of the Dominican friars and the Franciscan nuns of St Chiara (Bonatti 1988, 121137). The materials found in Sarzana that can be linked to the products forming the communal endowment of the religious institute are expressions of a rened technological culture (Morra 1996, 173 176). Thats because the stylistic level of the gures represented presupposes advanced creative ability, considering the artistic result of the product in which object, that belonged to one of the nuns, who was probably killed by the plague of 16561657 (Presotto 1965, 370420). The materials found in Sarzana can be linked to this same example, because they share the same cultural motives, morphology, technological characteristics and decorative schemes (de Vingo 2001, 186). Discussion and conclusions The possibility of applying archaeological methods to conventual contexts, both male and female, generates signicant problems of integration and comparison with the situation, certainly more variable, reported by the archival sources. These, as it is obvious that they should be, refer to specic signicances for determined objects and, at the same time, describe the presence of entire categories of objects that, for reasons of preservation, rarely or never appear in the data registered from excavations (Gelichi et al. 1998, 136). The examination of the objects that provide evidence of community behaviours, in relation to the consumption and the individual properties that together make up the material culture, so variable in the written sources, must be restricted to the pottery. These are the only objects consistently present and in sufcient quantities in archaeological deposits. Their representativeness permits us to reconstruct how they were used in an individual community and, at the same time, to compare those objects with the materials from other contexts. It should be recalled however that, from this point of view, there are still only limited conventual contexts in which a complex and lasting sequence, with a discussion of quantitative production indices, is available for study. Usually, the conventual pottery, when Figure 3 Conventual pottery originating from the context of 1 St Domenico and 2 the monastery of the Clarisse 14 Paulo de Vingo it is recognised, ends up being analysed exclusively at a typological level based on what is indubitably a legitimate approach but of little use, however, for understanding the mechanisms through which such contexts were formed within a specic social nucleus. Basically, in this situation, one reproduces and amplies a social approach to the history of production and the usage of post-classical pottery that, in general, has always characterised, in a negative sense, our study methods. With the aim of formulating a hypothesis concern- ing the formation of these pottery centres, it would be useful to restate some of the considerations that were formulated earlier with regard to the pottery present in convents, to identify those product categories that inuenced their supply over time and in relation to other social contexts (Gelichi et al 1998, 136). . Undifferentiated pottery, of daily use also in secular contexts. The only items present up to the mid 15th century, they are continually found in considerable numbers even in the modern era. . Pottery decorated with subjects of a religious nature or generalised iconography, such as the cross, symbols of the Passion, the lamb, the chalice or the trigram IHS of St Bernardino of Siena. These are all objects present with some continuity within monastic contexts in the Po Valley area, between the 15th and the 19th centuries. Sometimes they are also present with the same characters in secular contexts. . Pottery with markings relative to monasteries or portraits of specic saints. In this case the nds are concentrated between the 15th and the 16th centuries. . Undifferentiated pottery, typical also of secular contexts, featuring monograms engraved on the piece after purchase. . Pottery produced ad personam, featuring monograms, names, family crests with monograms or dates. This phenomenon seems to develop mainly during the 1600s. . Pottery with monograms related to their place of use cellars, kitchens, refectories, inrmaries, or at the table soup plates, salad bowls some of which, however, are not exclusive to religious contexts. Based on the published examples of Ligurian monastic contexts we can suggest that the mens monasteries utilised almost exclusively materials from the rst three groups. Besides the current types of pottery, the excavation of St Domenico in Savona, for example, has produced only shards with the monogram SD, with the trigram IHS or with dates associated to symbols. In contrast with the womens convents, the previously described categories almost always appear together with the exclusion (or at least in a truly modest quantity) of pottery with monograms engraved on the piece, or items specially produced with engravings that allow them to be easily and immediately identied. The production of pieces with a specic iconographic scheme, therefore, seems to receive a signicant impulse during the same 25 years in which the Council of Trento began its work. Therefore, if on the one hand the praxis can be considered the result of a different type of pressure, in that a certain level of personalization was already present in the late fteenth century, on the other it can be said that successively diversied needs and tastes came together (Gelichi et al 1998, 137). Lets attempt to summarise: the general framework of the nds from womens convents in Liguria is, after the mid 16th century, certainly more complex. Such complexity is, in my opinion, clearly linked to the diverse methods for supplying materials, also considering how inuential and determinant the institution of the dowry has been shown to be. A preliminary and incomplete verication of the written sources has revealed how common in the womens monasteries was the practise of donating large quantities of those objects that exceeded the needs of the individual. These consistent donations of materials by the sore morte (literally the deceased sisters), periodically provided an indispensable support for sustaining the community. Amongst these donations there are also indications that refer explicitly to the presence of pottery. Communal purchases of recipients must have been made in rather modest quantities because the needs of the womens convents were to a great extent probably already satised by the dowry gifts. In the Ligurian territory pottery personalised for private use (before or after the purchase) would not seem to be very common, but in particular there is a signicant amount of pottery personalised for community use that becomes part of the dowry given to the convent together with the novice. Despite the fact that the study of this phenomenon is only in the early stages and more complete and precise archaeological data are not yet available, documents do exist (and in the process of being transcribed) that provide evidence of the purchase of numerous quantities of pottery for use in communal life and brought to the monastery with the individual nuns in the form of a dowry, and naturally in such large quantities that a strictly personal use can, to all intents and purposes, be excluded (Gelichi et al 1998, 138). When the doctrinal religious reforms began to bring back within the limits of the communal life what was previously a complex social panorama within each individual convent, one notes the development of a countertrend that attempted to facilitate the recovery of personal donations. This countertrend was conned to the womens monasteries, where the situation could be interpreted as a clear response by the family which obviously had an interest in maintaining the differenti- ation within the monastic structure and by the same nuns whose duty it was to carry forward such interests and privileges. If the available archaeological data has been interpreted correctly this phenomenon had already begun during the Council of Trento and it is likely that it was affected by the rst practical results of the Reform initiated at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Conventual pottery in Sarzana 15 Acknowledgements The materials presented in this contribution come from the excavations carried out by the Department of Archaeological Heritage of Liguria in Sarzana between 1990 and 2001, directed by Alessandra Frondoni, Archaeologist Director Coordinator with the same Department. The archaeological research was entrusted to the Societ Lombarda di Archeologia (SLA) under the operative responsibility of Fabrizio Geltrudini. My sincere thanks go to Alessandra Frondoni for authorising the presentation of the data on this occasion, while I am indebted to Fabrizio Geltrudini for his considerations regarding the particular problems relating to his excavations in Sarzana. Rossana Managlia created the drawings of the materials presented here, while Tatiana Sidoti was responsible for the initial cleaning of the objects. References Bernat, C, Ciccotti, M, Giacchino, G and Restagno, D 1986, Lo scavo della fornace Giacchino (Albisola Superiore AugustSeptember 1983). Parte I La ceramica grafta, Atti del Convegno Internazionale della Ceramica, XIX, Albisola, 131154. Blake, H 1981, La ceramica medioevale di Assisi, Ceramiche medioevali dellUmbria: Assisi, Orvieto, Todi, Florence, 1533. de Vingo, P 2001, I materiali medievali e postmedievali provenienti dagli scavi urbani, Giornale Storico della Lunigiana e del territorio lucense, XLIX, 14, 171224. Farris, G 1968, La maiolica conventuale ligure nei depositi di scavo, Atti del Convegno Internazionale della Ceramica, I, 266270. Farris, G and Rebora, G 1971, Ceramica conventuale importata a Genova nel XVII secolo (Recenti rinvenimenti), Atti del Convegno Internazionale delle Ceramica, IV, Albisola, 129140. Francovich, R 1982, La ceramica medievale a Siena e nella Toscana meridionale (secc XIVXV). Materiali per una tipologia, Florence: AllInsegna Del Giglio. Frondoni, A and Geltrudini, F 2000, Archeologia urbana a Sarzana: indagini preventive e demergenza, in G P Brogiolo (ed), Atti del Congresso Nazionale di Archeologia Medievale, II, Florence: AllInsegna Del Giglio, 107113. Gardini, A 1993, La ceramica del convento della Santissima Annunziata a Levanto, in P Donati (ed), Le Arti a Levanto nel XV e XVI secolo, Milan, 143163. Gardini, A 1996, Piazza della Maddalena. I materiali. Periodo Medievale, in P Melli (ed), La citt ritrovata. Archeologia urbana a Genova (19841994), 333339. Gardini, A and Melli, P and Milanese, M 1982, S Maria in Passione. Per la storia di un edicio dimenticato in P Melli (ed), Quaderni, 5, Genoa. Gardini, A and Benente, F 1994, Ceramica post- medievale in Liguria: dati archeologici, Atti Convegno Internazionale della Ceramica, XXVII, 4772. Gardini, A and Benente, F 1997, Archeologia postmedievale in Liguria, in M Milanese (ed), Archeologia Postmedievale: lesperienza europea e lItalia, Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Sassari 1720 October 1994, Florence: AllInsegna Del Giglio, 305328. Gelichi, S 1987, La ceramica medievale, in S Gelichi and R Merlo (eds), Archeologia Medievale a Bologna. Gli scavi nel Convento di San Domenico, Bologna, 182193. Gelichi, S 1998, La cultura materiale e i monasteri femminili tra XVI e XVII secolo, in S Gelichi and M.Librenti (eds), Senza immensa dote. Le Clarisse a Finale Emilia tra archeologia e storia, Biblioteca di Archeologia Medievale, 15, Florence: AllInsegna Del Giglio, 107109. Gelichi, S and Librenti, M 1998, Monasteri, cultura materiale e archeologia: alcune linee di ricerca, in S Gelichi and M Librenti (eds),Senza immensa dote. Le Clarisse a Finale Emilia tra archeologia e storia, Biblioteca di Archeologia Medievale, 15, Florence: AllInsegna Del Giglio, 136142. Mannoni, T 1968, La ceramica in Liguria dal secolo VI al secolo XVI, Atti del Convegno Internazionale della Ceramica, I, 213228. Mannoni, T 1975, La ceramica conventuale a Genova e nella Liguria BordigheraGenova. Milanese, M 1985, Larea dellex monastero di S Margherita ed il versante occidentale del colle di Carignano in Genova, Archeologia Medievale, XII, 17128. Morra, C 1996, La ceramica ingobbiata in G Pant (ed), Il Monastero della Visitazione a Vercelli, Quaderni della Soprintendenza Archeologica del Piemonte, Monograe, 5, Alessandria: Edizioni DallOrso, 289366. Nepoti, S 1978, Le ceramiche postmedioevali rinvenute negli scavi nella torre civica di Pavia, Archeologia Medievale, V, 171218. Nepoti, S 1991, Ceramiche grafte dalla donazione Donini Baer, Faenza. Presotto, D 1965, Genova 16751657. Cronache di una pestilenza, Atti della Societ Ligure di Storia Patria, Nuova Serie, V, LXXIX, 370420. Pringle, D 1977, La ceramica dellarea Sud del convento di San Silvestro a Genova (19711976), Archeologia Medievale, IV, 100161. Ramagli, P 1996, Ingobbiate e grafte monocrome e policrome in R Lavagna (ed), Museo Archeologico di Savona al Priamr, Genoa, 5862. Ramagli, P and Ventura, D 1999, Savona. Priamr- complesso di S Domenico, Archeologia Medievale, XXVI, 221222. Zarri, G 1986, Monasteri femminili e citt (secoli XV XVIII), La Chiesa e il potere dal medioevo allet contemporanea, Storia dItalia, Annals, 9, 357429. 16 Paulo de Vingo Zusammenfassung In Ligurien wirft die archologische Methodik, die bei der Ausgrabung sowohl mnnlicher als weiblicher Klster verwendet wird, bedeutende Schwierigkeiten auf, was die Einbindung und den Vergleich innerhalb des sicherlich weit komplizierteren Rahmens angeht, wie er uns aus dokumentren Quellen bekannt ist. Offensichtlich beziehen sich diese Quellen auf die besondere Bedeutung bestimmter Gegenstnde, beschreiben aber gleichzeitig die Existenz ganzer Produktgruppen, die aus Grnden der Erhaltung selten oder nie in eine Ausgrabungsdokumentation eingehen. Die Analyse von Gegenstnden, die Beweismaterial fr das gesellschaftliche Verhalten in Bezug auf deren Gebrauch und des persnlichen Eigentums daran liefern, wie sie so sorgfltig ausgearbeitet in schriftlichen Quellen erscheint, mu hier allein auf keramische Stcke begrenzt bleiben. In diesem Beitrag beabsichtigt der Autor bei der Untersuchung solcher Materialien die wirtschaftlichen Entwicklungen in religisen Gemeinschaften zu rekonstruieren und die Herkunftsquellen zu bestimmen, das heit durch Tpfereigegenstnde eine soziale und nicht nur archologische Interpretation des religisen Zusammenhangs zu geben. Rsum En Ligurie les mthodes archologiques utilises lors de fouille de sites monastiques, pour moines et religieuses, limitent les possibilits dintgration et de comparaison avec les donnes recueillies dans les sources crites sur ces structures complexes. De toute vidence ces sources parlent de symbolique particulire pour chaque objet et, en mme temps, dcrivent la prsence de catgories entires dobjets qui pour des raisons de mauvaise conservation, sont rarement ou jamais inclues dans le matriel archologique. Lanalyse du matriel donnant des informations sur lusage communautaire et la proprit prive des objets, si labors dans les sources crites, doit malheureusement se limiter au matriel cramique. Par cette contribution, lauteur espre reconstituer les fluctuations conomiques des communauts religieuses, dterminer les sources dapprovisionnement et, grce aux objets cramiques proposer la fois une interprtation archologique et sociale du milieux religieux. Conventual pottery in Sarzana 17 Figure 1 Excavation of a wooden staved bucket at Kirk Close in Perth. Courtesy of SUAT Ltd What did medieval people eat from? The differential survival rates of pot and wood give us difculties in estimating proportions of each in use during the medieval period. An individual site can easily yield 30,000 pot sherds and even if there is a waterlogged pit only a few wooden bowls and perhaps one fragmentary pewter vessel. Given this tremendous outnumbering it is easy to overestimate the importance of pot at the time. The truth is that in an age when all cooking was done over an open re an old damaged fat soaked wooden bowl would be the perfect kindling, the few that were not burnt would rot away unless quickly buried and continually waterlogged. Damaged or outdated pewter vessels would be melted down to make new vessels, compared to this virtually every pot ever made is still there in the ground. If we look at medieval accounts we nd that woodware was purchased in vast quantities, for the wedding of Richard II in 1189 over 12,000 wooden vessels were ordered. The Howard household accounts from 1460 1485 include orders for 2,562 wooden vessels, an average of 100 a year over the 25 year period. In contrast Chris Dyer looking for records of purchases of pots has never seen an individual order for more than 24 pots, the norm being orders for one or two at a time and an average of about 3 pots per household per year. In 14312 the household accounts of John de Vere Earl of Oxford record orders for an unusually large total of 25 pots (11 for the cellar presumably jugs 10 for the kitchen) but in the same year they ordered 96 pewter vessels and 234 wooden cups/bowls. Could three pots a year give rise to the large pottery assemblages commonly found on medieval sites or are the pots not being recorded? Chris Dyer suggests the accounts are pedantic enough to record everything and the wooden vessels which are recorded are no higher value (average two vessels for 1d). Three vessels per year would be 1,500 pots over a 500-year period, if each or these was broken into 20 sherds we would have 30,000 sherds. If the same household was ordering 100 wooden vessels a year then 50,000 wooden vessels would have been used/ burnt/disposed of on the same site over the same period. Were so few pots ordered because they had a very long in use lifespan compared to wood? I would be Robin Wood 19 interested to know of any work suggesting average lifespans of pots before disposal. The huge numbers of wooden vessels ordered by medieval households suggests that they were replaced regularly yet the vessels that survive commonly show signs of very long use, wear repair and continued use. Perhaps the large house- holds were continually replacing their vessels with new ones and passing them on down the social scale where they had longer useful lives. One example of this may be a record of the butler of Prince Edward (the future Edward V) who was entitled to the worn cups as part of his pay (Woolgar 1999). It has been suggested that woodware does not vary much over time or regionally though it is becoming clear as more pieces are found that there was as much variation in wood as pot. There is no doubt if we had hundreds of thousands of surviving pieces that it would be possible to identify local styles which changed through time, so far we have in the region of 1,000 wooden vessels surviving from the medieval period in Britain and these form only a small part of a much larger picture. Carole Morris has described it as the tip of a wooden ice berg. For every vessel that has ever been found it is likely that 100,000 were produced used and burnt. The vessel forms do change through time and they were also used at all levels in society not as just by the poor. Two of the richest ship burials in Europe Sutton Hoo and the Oseberg Ship were well equipped with wooden vessels. From pre-conquest sites in Britain wooden bowls tend to be fairly small (6" 8" diameter) hemispherical in form and most commonly made of alder. Another characteristic pre-conquest form is the globular drinking cup, most commonly made of maple and 3" 4" diameter, examples come from Coppergate York, Winchester and small walnut ones from Sutton Hoo. After the Norman Conquest this form gradually gets replaced by drinking bowls, the practice is commonly seen in medieval illustrations from the Bayeux Tapestry onwards. Post conquest bowls tend to be of similar hemi- spherical form but ash becomes the favourite timber (Morris 2000). These vessels are commonly referred Summary Despite large numbers of pottery fragments occurring on most medieval excavations including many that are classied as tableware the proportion of what could be described as eating vessels is very small. The predominant forms are jugs, storage and cooking pots. This paper looks at the production, purchase and use of wooden eating and drinking vessels and compares and contrasts this with pottery. 20 Robin Wood Zusammenfassung Trotz der groen Anzahl an Tpferscherben, die bei mittelalterlichen Ausgrabungen vorkommen inklusive derjenigen, die als Tafelware bezeichnet werden, bleibt der Anteil dessen, was man als Egefe beschreiben knnte, gering. Die berwiegenden Formen sind Krge, Vorrats- und Kochtpfe. Die vorliegende Arbeit betrachtet die Herstellung, den Kauf und die Benutzung hlzerner E- und Trinkgefe und vergleicht sie mit Tpferware und stellt sie dieser gegenber. Rsum En dpit du grand nombre de tessons de poterie retrouvs sur les fouilles de sites du Moyen Age, en particulier les fragments de poterie classifie comme vaisselle de table, le pourcentage de cramique que lon peut dcrire comme vaisselle pour manger est faible. Les formes prdominantes sont les cruches, la cramique culinaire et les jattes. Cet article examine et compare la production, la consommation et l utilisation des vaisselles de table en bois celles en cramique. to in medieval accounts as ciphis fraxini, often translated as ashen cups; it is not clear if they were primarily eating or drinking vessels or, perhaps most likely, dual purpose. One thing that is clear is that they do not have knife cuts in them so whilst they were probably used for pottage they were not used for meat or anything that required cutting. Some bowls called mazers were turned very thin from maple and reserved as drinking vessels, these sometimes had gilt rim mounts, excellent examples are on display in the Museum of Canterbury and the British Museum. The wooden bowl as the universal drinking vessel went into decline in the 15th century with the introduction of pottery drinking jugs and the last large collection of wooden drinking bowls are from the Mary Rose 1545. Through he 16th century the wooden dish became more common, up to this point over 95% of eating vessels had been bowls which work well for hand holding and eating pottage. Perhaps the change toward dishes and latter plates was diet related as all dishes have knife cuts indicating people were now eating meat from individual vessels, or perhaps it has more to do with sitting at a table to eat a practice which became much more common for ordinary people during the 17th and 18th centuries. The second half of 17th Century saw a vast increase in the amount of pottery vessels which I would class as eating vessels, bowls, dishes and plates. This was the period when pottery replaced wood as the standard eating vessel for normal peoples everyday use. It is interesting that it was also the period when turned parts became commonplace in furniture and there was a great increase in furniture production and use, the turners who for 1,000 years had produced tableware found a new market in chair legs. Reference Woolgar, C M 1999, The Great Household in Late Medieval England. A late medieval whiteware from Clarence Street, York Summary Excavations at 44 Clarence Street, York, by Antony Dickson in 2006 produced an unusual late medieval vessel which could not be precisely paralleled in form or fabric. It was recommended that analysis of this vessel was undertaken and the present paper is a result of that analysis. Description Form and manufacture The vessel is wheelthrown and globular-bodied with a squared rim, diameter c140mm, and has a rod-sectioned handle luted to the girth and outer edge of the rim. The body handle join is strengthened by thumbing on the interior. The exterior has a glossy pale olive (5Y 7/4) to olive (5Y 5/4) glaze, which does not extend over the handle (which suggests that the vessel was dipped in glaze, holding onto the handle). The glaze colour suggests local reduction and is probably an indication that the vessel was red one rather than given a biscuit ring and then a second glaze ring. A deliberate ridge or cordon is present on the shoulder but otherwise the vessel is plain. At x20 magnication the fabric is seen to be tempered with moderate quartzose sand grains, well- sorted and between c 0.5mm and 0.8mm across. The groundmass is ne-textured, pink (7.5YR 7/4), and sparse ne mica is visible. Alan Vince 22 The vessel is identied here as a product of the North Yorkshire whiteware potteries located on the western foothills of the Hambleton Hills and appears to have been a copy of late medieval Low Countries types. Thin section analysis The following inclusions were noted in thin section: Quartz Moderate subangular and rounded grains ranging from c 0.1mm to 0.8mm. The smaller grains tend to be more angular and the grains appear to be bimodal, with peaks at c 0.2mm and c 0.5mm. Some of the grains have a thin brown coating but since these grains are closest to the original surface of the sherd they are probably a post-burial inll of the shrinkage gap between the quartz and groundmass. Some of the grains have one or more straight edge, indicative of overgrowth with no trace of the original grain boundary. Most grains are monocrystalline and unstrained but monocrystalline strained grains and polycrystalline grains occur. The latter include strained crystals with sutured boundaries and unstrained mosaic quartz. These features indicate that some of the grains come from metamorphic rocks. Clay pellets Sparse inclusionless pellets up to 0.5mm across, slightly lighter in colour than the groundmass. Muscovite Rare sheaves up to 0.2mm long. The groundmass is light brown, optically anisotropic and contains sparse angular quartz and muscovite. Chemical analysis Chemical analysis was undertaken at Royal Holloway College, London, under the supervision of Dr J N Walsh using Inductively-Coupled Plasma Spectroscopy. A range of major elements were measured as percent oxides (Appendix 1) and a range of minor and trace elements was measured in parts per million (Appendix 2). Silica was not measured but was estimated by subtraction of the total measured oxides from 100%. The data were then normalised to aluminium. The features observed in thin section are similar to those of some Surrey Whiteware vessels (eg Kingston- type ware Pearce and Vince 1988) as well as to late 12th- to 13th-century York Glazed ware (Jennings 1992). Figure 1 Late mediveal whiteware vessel from 44 Clarence Street, York. Scale 1: 4 Neither type was in production in the late medieval period, when this vessel is likely to have been made and the contemporary late medieval wares are Coarse Border Ware and Brandsby-type ware. ICPS data is available for all these wares and a dataset consisting of production waste from sites in Surrey and North Yorkshire, and nds from YAT excavations in York was compared with the Clarence Street nd. The Surrey data consists of samples from Farnborough Hill, Kingston-upon-Thames and Southwark and the Yorkshire data consists of samples from the Brandsby kiln excavated by J Le Patourel; a sample from the Stearsby kiln; possible wasters of York Glazed ware from Byland Abbey and sherds of a 12th- century gritty ware recently identied as a North Yorkshire product contemporary with York Gritty ware, from a site at Easingwold. Discussion The Clarence Street vessel is identied here as a North Yorkshire, Hambleton Hills, product. However, its form is clearly late medieval in date and imitative of Low Countries redware vessels (such as the two-handled, footed cooking pots (Hurst, Neal, and van Beuningen 1986, Fig 59) or single handled tripod pipkins, Hurst et al 1986, Fig 60). These Low Countries vessels not only have the large rod handles found on the Clarence Street vessel but also the cordon on the shoulder. This feature is probably itself a skeuomorph of cast copper-alloy vessels which are also mostly of late medieval date. The chemical similarity of the Clarence Street vessel to York Glazed ware and North Yorkshire gritty ware vessels from Easingwold is probably due to the fact that all three groups are deliberately tempered with quartzose sand and that the main discriminating element is zirconium, which is present mainly in zircon grains. The sand used to temper these vessels therefore has a higher zirconium content than the Brandsby and Stearsby vessels which contain similar quantities of silica, but from a different source, the parent clay. The discovery of this vessel requires a reconsideration of the classication of North Yorkshire medieval whitewares. On the one hand, the visual similarity of this vessels fabric to York Glazed ware is conrmed and this means that undecorated body sherds cannot be dated more closely that late 12th to late 14th/15th centuries. On the other hand, York Glazed ware is actually dened mainly on style and decoration and it would clearer if fabric and form/style were treated separately. Table 1 is an attempt to clarify the products of the Hambleton Hills Whiteware Industry and includes waste from Castle Howard, which was recovered from excavations undertaken by Time Team in 2002 (Vince 2002). Confusingly, the products of the latter industry are classied as Hambleton ware, but Castle Howard is actually in the Howardian Hills. It is proposed that the Clarence Street vessel and similar vessels containing quartzose sand temper not paralleled at the Brandsby kiln are classied as Gritty Brandsby-type ware. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Stephen Willows, Contract Manager, Lintoin Construction, York, for permission to publish this note. Figure 2 Factor analysis of this data (omitting mobile elements calcium, phosphorus, strontium and the rare earth elements) indicates four main factors and a plot of the factor scores for the two main factors clearly indicates two clusters, one consisting of Surrey products and the other North Yorkshire products which can be subdivided on the basis of the F1 and F2 scores into an Easingwold group and the rest. The Clarence Street vessel falls into the Bransby/Byland/Stearsby group. Figure 3 The Factor 3 scores do not separate any of the groups but the Factor 4 scores (essentially a reection of zirconium and cobalt values) separate individual groups within the two main clusters. This is made clear by including the estimated silica values, which distinguish the Surrey and North Yorkshire groups. The diagram shows a plot of estimated silica scores against F4 scores and in this plot the Clarence Street vessel plots between the Byland and Easingwold groups. 22 Alan Vince References Hurst, J G, Neal, D S, and van Beuningen, H J E (1986) Pottery Produced and Traded in North-West Europe 13501650. Rotterdam Papers VI Rotterdam, Museum Boymansvan Beuningen. Jennings, Sarah (1992) Medieval Pottery in the Yorkshire Museum. York, The Yorkshire Museum. Pearce, J E and Vince, A G (1988) A Dated Type-series A late medieval whiteware from ClarenceStreet, York 21 Zusammenfassung Ausgrabungen in 44 Clarence Street, York, unter der Leitung von Antony Dixon im Jahre 2006 brachten ein ungewhnliches, sptmittelalterliches Gef zutage, fr das keine genauen Parallelen in Form und Material vorlagen. Es wurde empfohlen, dieses Gef zu unter- suchen und die vorliegende Arbeit zeigt das Ergebnis dieser Untersuchung. Das Gef wurde als Erzeugnis der Nord-Yorkshire Weiwaren Tpfereien identifiziert, die in den westlichen Auslufern der Hableton Hills liegen und scheint eine Kopie der spt-mittelalterlichen, niederlndischen Art zu sein. Rsum Des fouilles entreprises Clarence Street, York par Anthony Dickson en 2006 ont rvl une cramique inhabituelle du Bas Moyen-Age sans quivalent en matire de forme ou de pte. Une analyse plus pousse de cette cramique a t demande et les rsultats en sont prsents ici . Cette cramique provient des centres de production de North Yorkshire Whiteware situs sur les contreforts ouest de Hambleton Hills et semble tre une copie de types des Pays Bas du Bas Moyen-Age. of London Medieval Pottery: Part 4, Surrey Whitewares. London Middlesex Archaeol Soc Spec Pap 10 London, London Middlesex Archaeol Soc. Vince, Alan (2002) Assessment of the medieval and later pottery from Castle Howard, North Yorkshire (CASH02). AVAC Reports 2002/81 Lincoln. Appendix 1 TSNO Al2O3 Fe2O3 MgO CaO Na2O K2O TiO2 P2O5 MnO V4510 23.51 3.42 1.04 0.52 0.25 2.35 1.25 0.26 0.015 Appendix 2 TSNO Ba Cr Cu Li Ni Sc Sr V Y Zr* La Ce Nd Sm Eu Dy Yb Pb Zn Co V4510 398 107 44 115 54 23 95 189 45 102 72 119 75 16 4 8 4 6,184 83 22 Table 1 fabric 12th century Late 12th to 13th century Later 13th to 15th centuries gritty NYGW (Easingwold) none none sandy York Glazed (Byland) Gritty Brandsby-type (Clarence Street) untempered Brandsby-type (Brandsby, Stearsby) fine white Hambleton (Castle Howard) Table 1 pottery group reference abbreviation Normandy White ware this note NORW Normandy Gritty ware, found at Exeter Hughes forthcoming NORG Normandy Gritty ware, found at Leith This note Leith NORG Northern France, found at Boston Vince 2005 NFREM Northern France; found at Exeter, Southampton, Hughes forthcoming NFRE Worcester and Dublin McCutcheon 2006 Rouen ware from Bergen, major elements only Deroeux et al 1994 ROUEN Dublin and Viborg McCutcheon 2006 La Londe ware Vince 2006 ROUEN UGW Early Glazed Ware from Rouen Vince unpublished ROUEN EGW Early Glazed Ware from York Vince unpublished EGW Table 2 element Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 Fe 2 O 3 0.862 0.143 0.119 MgO 0.834 -0.446 0.232 K 2 O 0.655 -0.525 0.405 TiO 2 -0.024 0.622 0.066 Na 2 O 0.108 0.036 0.501 sum of squares 1.879 0.883 0.487 percent of variance 37.6 17.7 9.7 Normandy whitewares from Ronaldsons Wharf, Leith, Scotland Samples of two whitewares from Ronaldsons Wharf, Leith, both putative Normandy products, (Haggarty, G 2006 word le 42),were selected by George Haggarty, courtesy of John Lawson the City of Edinburgh Archaeologist. These were studied using Inductively Coupled Plasma Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-ES) following on from the recent study of Scottish White Gritty ware (Jones et al 20023). The rst group consists of samples identied as Normandy Gritty ware (NORG) and the second of two samples of a ne whiteware not previously recognised on sites in the British Isles but identied by Duncan Brown as probably a Normandy product, and here given the ware name Normandy White ware (code: NORW). A range of major, minor and trace elements were measured, the rst as percent oxides and the remainder as parts per million (Appendix 1). The data were compared with various datasets, some of which were obtained at the Centre for Ceramic Research at the University of Caen where only major elements are measured (Deroeux et al 1994). Furthermore, it was subsequently realised that the CaO and P 2 O 5 values for some samples were enhanced (for example, the base level for calcium oxide was c. 0.3% and the enhanced samples ranged up to 3.3%), probably after burial, and therefore the element set was reduced further to exclude these elements. All the data was normalised by dividing the measured values by that for Al 2 O 3 to try and remove the dilution effect brought about by variations in quartz sand temper. The comparative data include samples of Rouen glazed wares, Rouen early glazed wares (10th/11th century), York Early Glazed Ware (which is probably a Lower Seine product) and La Londe ware from the kiln site (immediately south of Rouen on the south side of the Seine), La Londe ware from consumer sites in the British Isles (Vince 2006), Normandy Gritty ware from sites in Exeter (Hughes forthcoming), various other French and putative French whitewares, as described in Table 1. An estimate of silica content was obtained by subtracting the sum of the major elements from 100%. This indicated that the two Normandy white samples at Leith contain substantially less silica than any of the comparative material, whilst the Leith Normandy Gritty fabric had a similar silica content to the Exeter Normandy Gritty ware samples but less than the remainder of the comparative material (Figure 1). This is consistent with the appearance of these fabrics at x20 magnication, where the Lower Seine types can be seen to contain abundant silt-sized quartz. Alan Vince and Richard Jones 25 Factor analysis was carried out on this dataset using the WinStat for Excel program (Fitch 2001). This indicated only one factor with an eigenvalue over 1 (Table 2). The variation in this dataset was therefore the result, primarily, of uctuations in the contents of MgO and K 2 O, which are highly correlated, and TiO 2 . A plot of the F1 scores (dominated by the potassium, magnesium and iron oxide contents) for this dataset against those of F2 (eigenvalue 0.6; dominated by the cerium and lanthanum contents) was produced (Figure 2). This shows that the Leith samples can be distinguished from much of the comparanda using a combination of these two factors. All of the Lower Seine samples (La Londe ware ROUEN UGW; Early Figure 1 The silica ranges in the pottery groups from Normandy, Northern France, Rouen and the test samples from Leith (see Table 1) Figure 2 Plot of the rst two factor scores resulting from factor analysis for the pottery samples in the nine groups shown 26 Alan Vince and Richard Jones Lower Seine Glazed ware (ROUEN EGW); and medieval Rouen ware (ROUE) had higher F2 scores, as did the samples of Early Glazed Ware from York (EGW). It is therefore clear that neither the Leith Normandy Gritty ware nor Normandy White ware were lower Seine products. The Leith data were then compared with a set of analyses carried out for Phillippe Husis study of Western French glazed wares. These analyses, which were carried out using XRF, did not include lithium, scandium, neodymium, samarium, europium, dysprosium, ytterbium, and cobalt. The Exeter Normandy Gritty ware samples and the La Londe kiln waste samples were included in this analysis. Factor analysis revealed 3 factors with eigenvalues over 1 (Table 3). A plot of the rst two factors (Figure 3) shows that the Leith samples and the Exeter Normandy Gritty ware samples tend to have higher F1 scores than the western French whitewares and La Londe ware (with a few exceptions). A plot of the rst against the third factor (Figure 4) separates the La Londe samples from the remainder. This analysis conrms that the Leith samples are not western French products. Finally, the Leith data were compared with samples of French whitewares from Dublin, Exeter, Southampton and Boston, all of which were analysed using ICPS and include data for the same range of elements as the Leith samples. Four factors with eigenvalues over 1 were found (Table4). A plot of F1 against F2 for this data (Figure 5) shows that the Exeter Normandy Gritty ware samples have higher F2 scores, whilst the Southampton whiteware samples and those from Dublin have similar F1 and F2 scores. However, a plot of the F3 against F4 scores (Figure 6) separates the Leith samples from the remainder except for ve of the Dublin samples. However, when the F1 and F2 values for these ve samples is examined, it is evident that they too can be separated from the Leith samples, having lower F1 and F2 scores. These Dublin samples consist of whitewares of unknown origin identied as French by their general method of manufacture and fabric characteristics (pers comm C McCutcheon). In conclusion, although there are differences in chemical composition between the two groups of whiteware from Leith, as can be seen from their compositions in (Appendix 1), when compared with a range of French whitewares these two groups are consistently more similar to each other than to other samples. However, the closest match is with the four samples of Normandy Gritty ware from Exeter, although even these samples can be distinguished from the Leith ones. The most likely interpretation of this data is therefore that the two Leith fabric groups are indeed of Normandy origin but not from the Lower Seine valley, nor, probably, from the same production site as those found at Exeter. Table 3 element Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 K 2 O 0.841 0.187 -0.132 MgO 0.829 0.120 -0.283 Fe 2 O 3 0.814 0.074 0.185 V 0.639 0.231 0.415 Ni 0.635 0.149 0.135 Ba 0.591 0.510 -0.072 Zn 0.581 -0.077 0.258 Zr -0.447 0.421 -0.241 MnO 0.325 -0.073 0.157 Ce 0.009 0.956 -0.065 La 0.048 0.903 -0.031 Na 2 O 0.185 0.763 -0.226 Y 0.095 0.540 0.220 Cr 0.227 -0.012 0.887 TiO 2 0.026 -0.093 0.856 sum of squares 3.96 3.192 2.101 percent of variance 26.4 21.3 14.0 Figure 3 Plot of the f irst two factor scores resulting from factor analysis for the samples in the Normandy Gritty ware, Normandy White ware, Rouen La Londe ware and the Western French White wares Figure 4 Plot of the scores on Factors 1 and 3 resulting from factor analysis for White ware from Amboise, Angers, Blois, Chinon, Exeter, La Londe, Leith, Poitiers, Rigny Uss and Tours. Factor 3 is dominated by the chromium and titanium contents Normandy whitewares from Ronaldsons Wharf, Leith, Scotland 27 Acknowledgements We are grateful to Clare McCutcheon and Michael Hughes for supplying copies of their data in digital form and for permission to use it in this study. George Haggarty suggested the analysis as part a survey of French pottery in Scotland. Figure 5 Plot of the f irst two factor scores resulting from factor analysis for the pottery samples from Boston, Dublin, Exeter, Normandy White and Gritty found at Leith, Southampton and Worcester Figure 6 Plot of the scores on Factors 3 and 4 resulting from factor analysis for the pottery samples from Boston, Dublin, Exeter, Normandy White and Gritty found at Leith, Southampton and Worcester Table 4 element Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 Factor 4 Sm 0.964 0.002 -0.025 0.043 Ce 0.938 0.134 0.152 0.111 La 0.905 0.146 0.276 0.090 Nd 0.898 0.167 0.284 -0.105 Dy 0.861 0.267 0.327 -0.154 Y 0.842 0.309 0.262 -0.198 Eu 0.820 0.396 -0.079 -0.0214 Ni 0.651 0.412 -0.085 -0.199 Yb 0.634 0.4249 0.553 -0.258 Sr 0.629 -0.049 0.091 0.289 K 2 O 0.110 0.928 0.002 0.215 MgO 0.153 0.919 -0.068 0.0396 V 0.226 0.810 0.140 0.247 Co -0.007 0.680 0.455 -0.166 Fe 2 O 3 0.388 0.610 0.202 0.008 Li 0.334 0.575 -0.137 -0.353 Zr 0.221 0.130 0.942 -0.122 TiO 2 0.1488 -0.090 0.813 0.174 Zn 0.349 -0.040 0.609 0.436 Cu 0.024 0.107 0.437 0.209 Na 2 O -0.225 0.245 0.251 0.654 MnO -0.152 -0.185 -0.115 0.647 Ba 0.185 0.499 0.162 0.638 Cr 0.315 0.113 0.310 0.561 sum of squares 7.528 4.665 3.282 2.394 % variance 31.4 19.4 13.7 10.0 References Deroeux, D Dufournier, D and Herteig, A (1994) French medieval ceramics from the Bryggen excavations in Bergen, Norway. Bryggen Papers: Supplementary Series 5, 161208. Fitch, Robert K (2001)Winstat for Microsoft (r) Excel. Haggarty, G 2006 A gazetteer and summary of French pottery imported into Scotland c 1150 to c 1650 a ceramic contribution to Scotlands economic history. A CD-Rom in Tayside and Fife Archaeological Journal, 12 (2006), 1178. Hughes, M J (forthcoming) Report on the analysis by inductively-coupled plasma atomic emission analysis (ICP-AES) of imported northern French pottery, including a sherd found at the Althea Library, Padstow. Jones, R E Will, R Haggarty, G and Hall, D (200203) Sourcing Scottish White Gritty Ware Medieval Ceramics 2627 (2003), 4584. McCutcheon, C (2006) Medieval Pottery from Wood Quay, Dublin: The 19746 Waterfront Excavations. Series B 7 Dublin, Royal Irish Academy. Vince, A (2005) The Imported Medieval Pottery from Boston (BSE01). AVAC Reports 2005/111 Lincoln, Alan Vince Archaeology Consultancy. Vince, A (2006) Les analyses scientiques des cramiques dates entre le VIIe et le VIIIe sicle provenant de Lundenvic (Cit de Westminster, Londres). In V Hincker and P Husi, eds, La Cramique du Haut Moyen Age dans le north-ouest, Editions NEA du Levant au Ponant, Conde-sur- Noireau, 365371. 28 Alan Vince and Richard Jones Zusammenfassung Proben zweier Weiwaren aus der Ausgrabung in der Ronaldson-Werft, Lieth, beide vermeintliche Erzeugnisse aus der Normandie, wurden auf Empfehlung John Lawsons, dem City of Edinbourg-Archologen, von George Haggarty fr diese Untersuchung ausgewhlt. In Verfolg einer krzlichen Untersuchung schottischer Wei-Sandware wurden diese Gefe mit Hilfe der ICPES-Methode (Inductively Coupled Plasma Emission Spectroscopy) untersucht. Die Daten ber die Zusammensetzung wurden dann mit verschiedenen anderen Waren verglichen: mit glasierter Rouen- Ware, mit frher glasierter Rouen-Ware (10. und 11. Jahrhundert), mit frher glasierter York-Ware (die wahrscheinlich ein Erzeugnis vom unteren Seine-Lauf ist) und auch mit La Lande-Ware von einer Tpferei unmittelbar sdlich von Rouen auf der Sdseite der Seine, sowie mit La Lande-Ware, wie sie an Sttten auf den Britischen Inseln gefunden wurden (Vince 2006), sowie mit normannischer Sandware von Ausgrabungen in Exeter (Hughes in Vorbereitung) wie auch mit anderer franzsischer und vermutlich franzsischer Weiware. Rsum Des chantillons de deux types de cramique blanche provenant de fouilles Ronaldsons Wharf, Leith, toutes deux provenant peut-tre de Normandie ont t slectionns par George Haggarty avec la permission de John Lawson Archologue en charge de la Cit dEdinburgh. Les donnes recueillies sur la composition ont t compares des chantillons de cramique vernie de Rouen, de cramique vernie prcoce de Rouen (10/ 11me sicles), de cramique vernie prcoce de York (probablement un produit de Basse Seine), de cramique du centre de production de La Londe (au sud de Rouen sur la rive sud de la Seine), de cramique de La Londe trouve sur des sites de consommation au Royaume Uni (Vince 2006), de cramique type Normandy Gritty ware dcouverte Exeter (Hughes paratre) et diverses autres cramiques blanches de France ou supposes de France. Appendix 1 Normandy White ware found at Leith: major elements (percent oxides) sample Al 2 O 3 Fe 2 O 3 MgO CaO Na 2 O K 2 O TiO 2 P2O 5 MnO N1 32.61 3.34 0.79 0.27 0.14 2.31 1.25 0.12 0.06 N2 30.85 2.61 0.75 0.17 0.14 2.17 1.19 0.05 0.02 mean 31.73 2.98 0.77 0.22 0.14 2.24 1.22 0.09 0.04 Normandy Gritty Ware found at Leith: major elements (percent oxides) SD standard deviation sample Al 2 O 3 Fe 2 O 3 MgO CaO Na 2 O K 2 O TiO 2 P 2 O 5 MnO LRW1 29.71 3.35 0.73 0.13 0.09 1.56 1.06 0.04 0.019 LRW2 26.57 2.44 0.56 0.14 0.12 2.05 1.19 0.07 0.010 LRW3 23.63 3.34 0.58 0.13 0.13 1.96 1.12 0.07 0.013 LRW4 23.28 3.19 0.56 0.14 0.13 1.91 1.09 0.08 0.012 LRW5 26.79 2.51 0.56 0.15 0.12 2.04 1.16 0.10 0.011 LRW6 26.46 2.48 0.56 0.13 0.13 2.04 1.17 0.09 0.010 LRW7 27.70 3.11 0.77 0.32 0.22 1.80 1.09 0.06 0.090 LRW8 25.75 3.76 0.73 0.44 0.20 1.60 1.10 0.05 0.023 LRW9 25.70 3.78 0.70 0.44 0.19 1.59 1.10 0.05 0.021 mean 26.18 3.11 0.64 0.22 0.15 1.84 1.12 0.07 0.023 SD 1.96 0.52 0.09 0.14 0.04 0.21 0.04 0.02 0.026 Normandy White ware found at Leith: trace elements (ppm) sample Ba Cr Cu Li Ni Sc Sr V Y Zr* La Ce Nd Sm Eu Dy Yb Pb Zn Co N1 458 173 36 308 70 20 167 126 27 81 81 143 81 9 2 5 3 49 51 20 N2 396 162 35 317 61 19 154 125 23 66 70 127 70 9 2 5 2 211 48 7 The use of ceramics in late medieval and early modern monasteries Data from three sites in East Flanders (Belgium) Summary Usually, the average pottery assemblages from waste layers or cess pits in monasteries do not seem to have typical features to identify their origin. The research of three monastic sites in Flanders resulted in a large dataset of late and postmedieval ceramics. It confirms the general picture of the use of pottery in abbeys, but it also revealed some special features, such as specific Koen De Groote* 29 Introduction This paper is a slightly adapted version of a presentation given at the MPRG Annual Conference, held in Chester on 12th14th June 2006, which had pottery from medieval institutions as the subject and was titled Ceramics cloistered and crenellated. This text will present and discuss some aspects of the use of ceramics in three monasteries in eastern Flanders during the late medieval and early post-medieval periods. For Flanders, this is a rst survey of the subject, based on published and unpublished data, and certainly not the account of a nished study. The three selected sites, all situated within a distance of 35 km in the Belgian province of East Flanders (Figure 1), have a different historical background. The Saint Saviour abbey of Ename, was founded in the 11th century, and represents an average male Benedictine abbey (Callebaut 1987). The second, the Beaulieu abbey of Peteghem is a female, Clarisse monastery, which became part of the Wealthy Clare Nuns, also called the Urbanists, after the 15th century reformation of the order (De Groote 1993). Both abbeys are situated in the countryside around Oudenaarde, in the valley of the river Scheldt. The third monastery is located within the walls of Aalst, a small town on the river Dender, situated between Brussels and Ghent. It is a male priory of the Carmelite Order, founded there in 1497 (De Groote et al 2005, idem 2006). * Flemish Heritage Institute (VIOE) . Wallestraat 167 . 9700 Oudenaarde-Ename . Belgium wearing marks on jugs and scratch marks, which give a link between the pottery and their monastic environment. The meaning of the specific presence of late-medieval mediterranean tin-glazed wares in monastic sites from inland Flanders is another subject that requires special attention in this context. Benedictine Saint Saviour abbey of Ename Until now, the Saint Saviour abbey of Ename is the best studied archaeological site of these monasteries. Excavations took place during the 80s and 90s and unearthed the complete central building complex of the abbey. Ceramic assemblages dating from the 12th to the early 18th century became available and were studied (De Groote 2008). These assemblages show particular characteristics in their composition, related to their time of deposition. Most of these characteristics can indeed be explained within the general chronological Examples from the abbey sites of Ename, Petegem and Aalst Figure 1 Location map. evolution of the consumption of ceramics in Flanders, but some elements seem to be connected with the status, the organisation or the way of living within the abbey. However, in the ceramic data, no specic links with religious life have been detected or recognised so far. The assemblages from the late 12th and early 13th century of the abbey of Ename contain a large percentage of highly decorated earthenware, all together almost 10 percent in sherd count, and more than 16% when quantied by rim percentage (De Groote 2008). This percentage is remarkable for this period, because the production of highly decorated wares had just started. A second remarkable fact is that almost half of the amount consists of an imported northern French highly decorated ware, probably produced in Douai (Figure 2) (De Groote 2006, 254255, 265). Some of the late-12th-century assemblages contain almost 6 % of this northern French import, while this pottery is rather exceptional in other rural or urban assemblages from the same period, both in the same region as in Flanders in general. The abbey probably acquired this pottery through its properties in Picardy, around Douai, especially during the second half of the 12th century (probably before 1190) (Louis 1996), when the Flemish local redware production did not yet produce this type of pottery. The data from the region of Oudenaarde Figure 2 Selection of Northern French highly decorated ware, found in the abbey of Ename. 0 10 cm 30 Koen De Groote seems to indicate that the social status of highly decorated jugs was rather high during their very rst period of appearance. Many late 12th-early 13th century examples, both local products and northern French imports, show traces of the use of mounted lids, probably in silver or pewter. On several rims very characteristic traces of heavy wear can be distinguished. This interpretation is supported by the nd of several fragments from the same jug, containing both a worn rim and an indented handle, clearly suggesting the use of a mounted metal lid (Figure 3). The conclusion to be made for this period is that pottery from the abbey of Ename shows elements of their social position (in this case exemplied by the status of tableware) and of their economic position (in this case the manner of acquisition). The ceramics reect status, but not the religious background of the site. Remarkable is the fact that during later periods, these traces of status more or less remain hidden in the general ceramic consumption waste of the Ename Abbey. Even the opposite is true: the ceramic assemblages of the 14th to 16th century contain a lot of lower status material, or even minor, second or third-class quality (De Groote 2008). A large 14th-century assemblage, derived from a sewer next to the guest-quarter of the abbey, contained an important assemblage of drinking vessels in greyware (Figure 4). In an early-16th-century cess-pit, poor quality cooking vessels were found. As an aside it can be mentioned that recent research in Flanders clearly shows that the percentage of stoneware within ceramic assemblages does not tell much about status from the middle of the 14th century onwards, stoneware is generally well spread but mostly only gives information about the amount of tableware present in an assemblage (De Groote 2008). One group of ceramics does seem to be linked to the religious character of the site: a group of early maiolicas dating from the late middle ages until the rst half of the 16th century. However, this assumed relation is the result of a recurrent pattern in the assemblages from monastic sites, related to this kind of pottery. This item will be discussed at the end of this paper, together with specic data from other sites. Clarisse Beaulieu abbey of Petegem The second abbey discussed is the Saint Clare monastery of Petegem, commonly called theBeaulieu abbey. On this abbey site, only two small excavation campaigns took place; one in the choir of the demolished 13th- century stone church (De Groote and Moens 2002), and one on the edge of the abbey enclosure, where a large refuse dump dating from the early 16th century was excavated (De Groote 1993). This rubbish context provided a good insight into the material culture of a female abbey from that period. The analysis of the different nds groups made clear that we were dealing with a general dump at the edge of the abbey lands, where all kinds of waste, derived from different parts of the abbey, were deposited together. The ceramic assemblage from this waste dump (in total more than 6000 sherds and about 880 vessels counted) (Figure 5) showed special features, of which the interpretation remains problematic (De Groote 2008). Scratch marks Remarkable is the appearance of scratch marks on the pottery (Figure 6). 104 examples with marks are present, mainly redware, representing about 12% of the total assemblage. But they only appear on six of the seventeen Figure 3 Fragment of a jug in Northern French highly decorated ware from the abbey of Ename. The worn rim and the indented handle point to the use of a mounted metal lid. Figure 4 14th-century drinking bowl in greyware from the abbey of Ename. 0 5 cm The use of ceramics in late medieval and early modern monasteries 31 32 Koen De Groote main vessel types: the bowl, the dish, the one-handled pipkin, the skillet, the chang dish and the ower pot (De Groote 1993, 375376). Remarkably, these scratch marks from Petegem are the only known examples from the whole region, while only a few examples are known from other parts of Flanders. This most probably indicates that these scratch marks on the vessels are linked with the identity of their users, in this case the nuns of the Beaulieu abbey. The heterogeneous character of the marks, and of the way of writing/scratching, seems to show that the owners/users made the marks themselves. The majority of these marks consist of one or two characters in roman or gothic script, possibly the initials of a real name or a monastic name (Figure 7). However, a large number of them seem to represent an abbreviation of a religious kind, like MA for Maria, I for Jesus, IC for Jesus Christ, IM for Jesus and Maria and F for Saint Francis (the Clarisse nuns basically followed the rule of Saint Francis). But also simple marks occur, for example symbols such as a trident, a cross or a star. At least 40% of the chang dishes, bowls and pipkins were marked in this way (De Groote 1993, 375376) (Figures 8 and 9). The symbols seem to represent property or user marks on individual utilities. Maybe this phenomenon is linked with the structure of the Beaulieu abbey during the period considered. The nunnery did not consist of a central cloister but of a collection of about 15 single larger and smaller buildings in a loose structure (Figure 10), with separate houses or cells for the nuns, as shown on an early-17th- century gouache of the abbey in the Albums de Cro (Duvosquel 1990, 10, pl 32). One interpretation of the marks is that they served to discriminate the vessels when bringing individual portions of food from the kitchen to an individual cell. The nature of most of the marked pottery forms does not contradict this interpretation, as they consist of one-handled cooking pots to carry individual portions directly from the re to the table, bowls to transport other prepared food, chang dishes to keep the food warm and dishes to eat. A study by Thier shows that the phenomenon of property marks mostly appears in abbeys (Thier 1995). Indeed the 15 known examples at the time of Thiers research, from Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, appeared to be from nunneries, among which 12 were 0 10 cm Figure 5 Ceramic assemblage from an early-16th-century waste layer from the Beaulieu abbey at Petegem. The use of ceramics in late medieval and early modern monasteries 33 of the Cistercian order. A recent study of a large 13th-century pottery assemblage from the female Cistercian abbey of Herkenrode (Belgium) revealed about ve examples of property marks on Andenne- type small cooking pottery, and are the earliest examples studied in Belgium (De Groote, unpublished). Also the scratch marks are in a two or three letter form, placed on small cooking pots and are from a Cistercian nunnery. Thier discusses several possibilities for the purpose of these marks. The rst one is that in nunneries with communal meals in a refectorium, marked pots could have served to make sure that individual meals arrived at the right person. This may have been the result of the social structure of the monastic community, where ladies of high status could have had certain prerogatives. From historical sources is known that part of the convent of both the Beaulieu abbey of Petegem and the monastery of Herkenrode consisted of noble origin (De Ghellinck 1912, Smeets 2006). A second possibility is a monastic system where nuns are preparing their own food or are eating separately. In this system monastic rules stipulated that meals only had to be used in community on sunday and on holidays. The specic structure of the Beaulieu abbey can be an indication in this direction. Another possibility is that tableware for the hospital had to be separated from the rest. Because of the high amount of marked pottery, it seems less probable that this was the case for the Beaulieu abbey. Another question is whether we have to consider these scratch marks as real property marks, or merely as marks of the users. In accordance to the common monastic rules, personal property was not allowed, all property belonged to the community. Property marks should thus be excluded. However, monastic rules were not strictly applied after a while, and a lot of examples are known of personal property and special prerogatives for high status religieux and for entered nobles (Thier 1995). These scratch marks point directly to the user of the pot. As mentioned, the marks are always made by different hands, which indicates the personal character of this action. Several objects with two different marks may support the hypothesis that we have to deal with user-marks or identication-marks on pottery that is common property (De Groote 1993, 373) (Figure 7.9, 0 5 cm Figure 6. Scratched marks on redware, finds from the Beaulieu abbey at Petegem.. 34 Koen De Groote Figure 7 List of scratched marks on redware from Petegem-Beaulieu. From De Groote 1993 The use of ceramics in late medieval and early modern monasteries 35 Figure 8 111 Redware bowls and 1215 pipkins with scratched marks from Petegem-Beaulieu. 36 Koen De Groote Figure 9 Redware chaf ing dishes with scratched marks from Petegem-Beaulieu. Figure 10 On the gouache from the Albums de Cro (16081609), the Beaulieu abbey is situated right of the castle of Petegem, across the River Scheldt. The abbey is depicted as a collection of buildings in a loose structure, protected by a cloister wall. The use of ceramics in late medieval and early modern monasteries 37 10, 12, 24, 32, 47). A possible explanation is that after the death of a user, the pot was passed through to a new user, who marked it with her own sign. But how do we explain the pots with double marks that are mostly remarked with the same sign, and with an abbreviation that points at a holy name, such as F (Saint Francis) or IM (Jesus and Maria)? This seems to be an extra argument that the marks point at the user of the pot, not at the owner. Maybe there is a link with some aspects of common property. But the use of abbreviations of holy names can also have had a direct religious meaning. It is certain that the appearance of marked pottery gives a remarkable insight on the use of ceramics in a religious community. The pattern not only yields information about the function of the pot itself, but also about its use, about the structure of property, about its use within a monastic community, and even about the organisation and customs of a nunnery. The analysis makes clear that the data can only be fully explored if combined with historical research: information on the monastic rules of Clarisse en Cistercian abbeys, on the structure, the customs and the practice in nunneries in Flanders in general and of the specic abbeys in peculiar, in this case the Clarisse Beaulieu abbey of Petegem and the Cistercian monastery of Herkenrode. Carmelite Holy Virgin priory of Aalst Several objects from the early 16th-century waste layer of Beaulieu refer to a religious context: religious texts on pottery and metal objects (O Mater Dei, memento me), or small clay pipe gures of the Holy Virgin, Christ as a child, the crucied Christ or Saint Catherine (De Groote 1993, 381382). Remarkably, such specic objects do not occur in the male Benedictine abbey of Ename. On the other hand, the ceramic assemblages from the male Carmelite priory of Aalst, the third abbey investigated from this region, show a comparable picture (De Groote et al. 2006b). The 16th-century waste pits almost always contained a number of specic ceramics. Several dishes with a religious text or a depiction in sgrafto were found, such as the IHS symbol (Figure 11.1), referring to the name of Jesus, or the depiction of the Holy Lamb (Figure 11.2). The presence of fragments of tens of statues and plaquettes in ne white or red-ring clay is also remarkable. Some iconographic themes are dominant: Maria with child and Christ as a child, but also fragments of a large plaquette depicting the crucied Christ were found (Figure 12). The Carmelites are also known as the Brothers of the Holy Virgin, and the Crowned Mary with Child was their symbol, also found on several other objects, like an ofcial seal matrix in copper alloy of the priory (Figure 13) and a silver ring, both found in monks graves, or a pewter pilgrim ampulla with Mary with child on one side and the Christ monogram on the other. Mediterranean maiolica in religious contexts A nal issue to discuss in this paper concerns the appearance of early maiolicas. In the research area, this type of pottery almost exclusively appears on monastic sites. At Aalst, the only known nds of Mediterranean pottery are originating from the carmelite priory: some fragments of Classic Valencian lusterware and of Isabela polychrome, a jug in Italo-Moresque ware, probably from Central Italy, and a very rare fragment of an incense burner in Merida-type ware from Portugal Figure 11 Redware dish and tazza with white slip and yellow glaze inside combined with a sgraf f ito decoration, from the Carmelite priory of Aalst. 38 Koen De Groote Figure 12 Fragments of a terracotta plaquette of the crucif ied Christ from the Carmelite priory of Aalst. Figure 13 Official seal matrix in copper alloy of the Carmelite priory of Aalst. from an early-16th-century context (Figure 14). At the benedictine abbey of Ename only some fragments of Valencian lusterware and of Isabela polychrome were found (De Groote 2008, pl 123A). A remarkable high quality dish from Deruta in Italy comes from a cess- pitt of the Franciscan monastery in the town of Oudenaarde (near Ename and Petegem) (Figure 15) (De Groote 2008). However, most striking is the remarkable collection of tin-glazed pottery, originating from production centres in Spain, Italy and the Low Countries, that was found as part of the early-16th- century waste layer of the Clarisse nunnery of Beaulieu (De Groote 1993, idem 2002b, idem 2008). In the Beaulieu context eighteen vessels can be identied as Valencian lusterware, amongst which one of the Pula-type, the early production of the14th century. Fifteen vessels belong to the Classic Valencian production, mainly from the 15th century (Figure 16) and two are from the Late Valencian overall lustre production (c 14751550). Two albarelli and one dish probably belong to the group of Paterna blue ware. One albarello can be identied as Catalan blue. The Isabela polychrome is represented by fragments of two dishes (De Groote 2008, tabel 95). Fragments of nine individual vessels represent South Netherlands maiolica seven jugs and/or vases, one bowl or dish, and one albarello although an Italian origin can not be excluded for the jugs and vases (Hurst 1999). For example: a vase-fragment decorated with blue foliage in a brown-orange and blue frame is very similar to a two-handled vase from the Guildhall in London, of which neutron activating analysis of the clay showed that its origin lies in Italy, and not in the southern part of the Low Countries, as thought before (Hughes and Gaimster 1999). Four sherds can be identied as fragments of Italian maiolica, probably from Tuscany (De Groote 2002b). A stem and a shoulder fragment derive from a vessel of the same type as the armorial maiolica vases from London. The two other sherds are fragments of a dish, with a decoration in brown-orange and blue. Figure 14 Large fragment of an incense burner in Merida-type ware (Portugal), from the Carmelite priory of Aalst. The use of ceramics in late medieval and early modern monasteries 39 Figure 15 Polychrome painted dish from Deruta, Italy, found in the Franciscan monastery of Oudenaarde. Figure 16 Bowl in Classic Valencian Lustreware, decorated with crowns, fern and elongated f lowers, from the Beaulieu abbey of Petegem. 0 5 cm Discussion The presence, within the research area, of late medieval Mediterranean maiolica, generally rare in Flanders, shows particular characteristics. Three elements will be discussed: rst, the specic locations of appearance, secondly, the large variety of groups, of which some are very rare, and thirdly the recurrent discrepancy between the period of fabrication and the period of deposition. Until the rst quarter of the 16th century, almost all known nds of early maiolica in the area of research (the towns of Aalst and Oudenaarde and the abbeys of Ename and Petegem), originate from abbeys. However, this clear and direct link between early maiolica and monastic sites is not a general pattern in all parts of Flanders. Most of the published Flemish nds were excavated in the coastal area (Hurst 1977; Mars1987). Mediterranean tin-glazed wares are present in ports (for example Bruges, Damme, Sluis), coastal settlements (for example Raversijde and Oostkerke), large trade towns (such as Bruges, Ghent or Antwerp) and abbeys. It seems that the distribution pattern is totally different in coastal areas compared to their hinterland, with a better distribution in terms of quantities of pots, number of sites or type of site, than further inland. In smaller inland towns, late-medieval Mediterranean pottery seems to be absent in civilian, middle-class households. Almost all nds from the inland are indeed coming from monastic sites, both in towns and on the countryside. The remarkable presence of maiolica in monastic sites is clearly not accidental. But what made this pottery so attractive to the monastic environment? It seems to have been much more than rare objects of prestige or beauty, as they do not appear in contexts of the substantial civilian middle-class of merchants and artisans. It appears that a certain religious connotation was present, which made this pottery attractive to monastic communities, but only a little or even completely not to the wealthy civilian middle-class. Looking at the pottery itself, we see that the monogram of Christ (IHS on Spanish maiolica and YHS on Italo- Netherlandish) is common. The numerous depictions of Spanish and Italian maiolica on religious paintings from the 15th century are corroborating this observation (De Groote 2008). However, it is not clear how this religious connotation has to be understood and how its symbolic meaning was experienced in that time. The more general spread in the Flemish coastal area, and also in England (Gutirrez 2000), shows that this association does not automatically implies that this pottery was only used in religious contexts. In this sense, the presence of two classic Valencian dishes with scratched marks in the waste deposit of the nunnery of Beaulieu (Figure 17), could point to a non-religious function. They just could be a reection of the wealth of the abbey. But more inland data is needed to get a better picture of the distribution and the use of this pottery. Figure 17 Scratch mark on a plate in Classic Valencian Lustreware from the Beaulieu abbey of Petegem. A second remarkable fact is the diversity of maiolica groups, especially within the Beaulieu abbey assemblage. At least three main production areas are represented: Spain, Central Italy and the Low Countries. The Spanish maiolica derives from three production regions: Valencia, Catalonia and Andalusia. Central Italy is represented by at least two production regions: one in Tuscany (probably Florence itself) and one in Umbria (Deruta, near Perugia). The origin of the early maiolica from the Low Countries remains unknown, but also here several production centres are possible. The Valencian products are best represented amongst the Mediterranean maiolicas. The limited presence of Catalonian, Andalusian and Central-Italian maiolicas probably is more the result of a limited supply (and accessibility) of these groups, than that they were less wanted. A third remarkable fact is that in most cases, the majority of Spanish maiolica is signicantly older than the period of deposition. In the early-16th-century assemblage of Beaulieu, that does not contain any residual material amongst the local wares or stoneware (De Groote 1993), most of the Classic Valencian lustreware must be dated before 1450, based on its form and/or decoration (De Groote 2008, tabel 94). One early Valencian dish in Pula-type ware even belongs to the 14th century (Blake 1986). This seems to indicate that this kind of pottery was treated with great care, and did not belong to the daily used material. In this way this pottery could be in circulation for many decades. On average, Valencian maiolica was 50 to 75 years old before it was thrown away, the Pula-type dish even at least 125 years old. The nature and the quantity of this maiolica seem to indicate that this Spanish lustreware, mostly dating from the middle of the 15th century, was thrown away at the same moment. In the beginning of the 16th century it probably became decrepit and unfashionable, maybe due to the rise of the Italian inspired Low Countries maiolica and the Italian Renaissance style tinglazed wares. It is not unlikely to suppose that at a certain moment the nuns decided to throw away a complete set of old and old-fashioned Mediterranean maiolicas. Conclusions The data presented here provide a rst idea of the potential and the possibilities of ceramic assemblages as part of the study of the material culture of monastic communities. A number of specic cases were discussed, from which a lot of new questions arose. Different angles of research are open: material culture as a mirror of wealth and status, as the expression of belief or monastic rules, the contrast between monasteries located at the countryside or in town, the differences between male and female monastic communities, etc... It is clear that a lot of research still needs to be done on this subject and that only a start is made exploring the possibilities. Acknowledgements I wish to thank Derek Hall for his encouragement to publish my Chester presentation, and for the corrections in the English text; Marta Caroscio for the assistance with the determination of the central Italian tin-glazed wares; Timothy Wilson for the determination of the Deruta dish. I also want to express my gratitude to my colleague Jan Moens from the Flemish Heritage Institute (VIOE) for his help with the illustrations and for the drawings of Figure 10. The photography of Figure. 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 12, 13 and 14 is from Hans Denis (VIOE). References Blake, H 1986, The ceramic hoard from Pula (prov Cagliari) and the Pula type of Spanish lustreware. In Segundo Coloquio Internacional de Cermica Medieval en el Mediterraaneo Occidental, Madrid, 365408. Callebaut, D 1987, De vroeg-middeleeuwse portus en Benedictijnenabdij van Ename (stad Oudenaarde). Interimverslag 1986, Archaeologia Belgica III, 213224. De Ghellinck, A 1912, Obituaire de labbaye de Sainte Claire de Beaulieu Peteghem-lez-Audenarde, Annales du Cercle Archologique et Historique dAudenarde IV, 39154. De Groote, K 1993, Het afval van de Rijke Klaren. Noodonderzoek in de voormalige abdij van Beaulieu te Petegem (gem Wortegem-Petegem, prov Oost- Vlaanderen), Archeologie in Vlaanderen II-1992, 335412. De Groote, K 2002a, Low countries maiolica: fragments of drinking bowls found at the Saint Salvator Abbey of Ename and in the town of Aalst (East-Flanders, Belgium), in J Veeckman (ed), Maiolica and glass: from Italy to Antwerp and beyond. The transfer of technology in the 16th early 17th century, Antwerp, 447448. De Groote, K 2002b, Spanish, Italian and South- Netherlands maiolica from an early-16th-century deposit of the Saint Clara Abbey of Beaulieu at Petegem (East-Flanders, Belgium) in J Veeckman (ed), Maiolica and glass: from Italy to Antwerp and beyond. The transfer of technology in the 16th-early 17th century, Antwerp, 443445. De Groote, K 2006, Lvolution de la ceramique dans la valle de lEscaut (Flandre) du IXe au XIIe sicle: Interprtations culturelles, sociales et conomiques in V Hincker and P Husi (eds), La cramique du haut Moyen Age (Ve-Xe sicles) dans la nord-ouest de lEurope. Bilan et perspectives dix ans aprs le colloque dOutreau. Actes du Colloque de Caen 2004, Cond-sur-Noireau, 249264. De Groote, K 2008, Middeleeuws aardewerk in Vlaanderen. Techniek, typologie, chronologie en 40 Koen De Groote Zusammenfassung Normalerweise scheinen die durchschnittlichen Tpferwarenfunde in klsterlichen Abfallagen oder Klrgruben keine typischen Merkmale zu haben, um ihre Herkunft zu identizieren. Die Untersuchung von Ausgrabungen dreier Klster in Flandern jedoch resultierte in einer umfangreichen Datei spt- und nachmittelalterlicher Keramik. Neben der Besttigung des allgemeinen Bildes vom Gebrauch von Tpferwaren in Klstern legte sie besondere Eigenarten, wie Anzeichen des Gebrauchs und Kratzspuren offen, die eine Verbindung zwischen der Ware und ihrer Benutzung im Kloster herstellen. Ein anderes Thema, dem in diesem Zusammenhang besondere Aufmerksamkeit gebhrt, ist die Bedeutung des speziellen Vorkommens spt- mittelalterlicher mediterraner Zinn-glasierter Ware in Klstern im andrischen Binnenland. Rsum Gnralement, les groupes de poteries provenant de couches de dchets ou des fosses daisance dans les monastres nont rien dexceptionnel ou de particulier qui didentifier leur origine. Suite une recherche entreprise sur trois sites monastiques de Flandres, une large base de donnes sur la cramique du Bas Moyen Age et de lEpoque Moderne a t accumule. Cette base de donnes a permis de confimer lide gnrale que lon avait sur la poterie dans les abbayes mais a aussi revl des caractristiques particulires comme des traces dusure bien spciques sur les cruches ou des graffitis gravs. Ces caractristiques tablissent un lien direct entre les cramiques et leur environnement monastique. La prsence de cramique tame mditerranenne du Bas Moyen Age dans les sites monastiques du centre de Flandres est aussi une question qui demande plus dtude. evolutie van het gebruiksgoed in de regio Oudenaarde in de volle en late middeleeuwen (10de16de eeuw), Relicta Archeologie, Monumenten- and Land- schapsonderzoek in Vlaanderen - Monograe 1, twee delen, Brussel. De Groote, K, De Maeyer, W, Moens, J and De Block, A 2005, Het archeologisch onderzoeksproject Hopmarkt te Aalst (OVl), Archaeologia Mediaevalis 28, 102104. De Groote, K, De Maeyer, W, Moens, J and De Block, A 2006a, Het archeologisch onderzoek op de Hopmarkt te Aalst (OVl), Archaeologia Mediaevalis 29, 4751. De Groote, K and Moens, J 2002, Prospectieopgraving aan de westzijde van de kapelaanwoning van de Rijke Klarenabdij van Beaulieu te Petegem (Wortegem- Petegem) (O-Vl), Archaeologia Mediaevalis 25, 8. De Groote, K, Moens, J and De Brandt H 2006b, Tijd voor Pottenkijkers. Cataloog bij de tentoonstelling Gelieve de werf te betreden. 25 jaar archeologie in de Aalsterse binnenstad, Aalst. Duvosquel, J (ed) 1990, Albums de Cro. Valleien van Schelde en Scarpe, Brussel. Gutirrez, A 2000, Mediterranean pottery in Wessex households (13th to 17th centuries), BAR British Series 306, Oxford. Hughes, M and Gaimster, D 1999, Neutron activation analyses of maiolica from London, Norwich, the Low Countries and Italy, in D Gaimster (ed), Maiolica in the North, British Museum Occasional Paper 122, London, 5790. Hurst, J G 1999, Sixteenth-century South Netherlands maiolica imported into Britain and Ireland in, D Gaimster (ed), Maiolica in the North, British Museum Occasional Paper 122, London, 91106. Hurst, J G and Neal, D S 1982, Late medieval Iberian pottery imported into the Low Countries, Rotterdam Papers IV, 83110. Louis, E 1996, La cramique trs dcore Douai. LEtat de question in, D Piton (ed), La cramique trs dcore dans lEurope du nord-ouest (Xme XVme sicle). Actes du Colloque de Douai (78 avril 1995), Nord-Ouest Archologie 7, 105120. Mars, A 1987, De luister van luster. Spaans-Islamitische lusteraardewerkvondsten uit Vlaamse en Nederlandse bodem (14de17de eeuw); een overzicht van de stand van zaken, Unpublished PhD manuscript. Smeets, M 2006, Herkenrode omgekeerd. Rapport betreffende het archeologisch onderzoek naar de resten van de voormalige cistercinzerinnenabdij, sl. Thier, B 1995, Besitzmarken auf sptmittelalterlicher und neuzeitlicher Keramik, in W Endres and F Lichtwark (eds), Zur Regionalitt der Keramik des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, 26. Internationales Hafnerei-Symposium 1993 in Soest, Denkmalpege und Forschung in Westfalen 32, Bonn, 167186. The use of ceramics in late medieval and early modern monasteries 41 Figure 1 Location map of the 14th-century Mamluk ceamic bottle. Figure 2 Drawing by Kate Armitage. Scale 1: 4 An unexpected catch for the Brixham trawler Catear Among the itmes recently donated to Brixham Heritage Museum is an unglazed earthenware bottle with moulded decoration. According to the donor Mr B T Stockton (Catear Fishing Co Ltd, Brixham), this item had been recovered ten years ago in the trawl net of Brixham trawler Catear whilst shing fteen miles off Start Point, slightly to the east (Figure 1). In August 2004, prompted by local newspaper accounts of archaeological activities carried out by Brixham Heritage Museum, Mr Stockton decided to bring the ceramic bottle to the museum for identication. At the initial examination of the item both of the authors recognised its antiquity and considered the decorative style was non-European, probably Near Eastern (Islamic). Photographs and measurements of the bottle were then sent to ceramic specialists in London and Oxford, which results in conrmation of its provenance and revealed further details about its dating and function. In view of the unusual nature of this nd off the south Devon coast, we decided to bring its discovery to the wider attention of archaeologists and ceramic specialists across Europe. Philip Armitage and Kate Armitage 43 Both the body and the ring base are complete but only the lower portion of the neck has survived with all of the mouth missing (probably resulting from post- depositional damage in antiquity) (Figure 2). The bottle is of unglazed earthenware (pinkish fabric) with moulded decoration(Figure 3), the maximum circumference of the body is 755 mm, the diameter of the ring base is 127 mm, and the height (from base to edge of surviving of the neck) is 272 mm. Tony Grey (Museum of London Specialist Services) was the rst ceramic specialist to answer our enquiry concerning the date and country of origin of this bottle. He identied it as a cram-ware bottle of the Mamluk period, most likely 14th-century in date, and probably made in Palestine or Syria. Professor James Allan (Deparment of Eastern Art, Ashmolean Museum Oxford) subsequently (independently) conrmed the dating and provenance, explaining also that such earthenware bottle in the Near East were used for water storage. Being unglazed, the water seeped slowly through the body, evaporating on the outside surface and thus colling the remaining liquid inside. Late medieval maritime trade The discovery by Brixham shermen of an Islamic ceramic bottle on the seabed off the south Devon coast suggests the presence at that location of a late- medieval shipwreck. Clearly this interpretation can only be conrmed if further associated artefacts are recovered from the same area, which to our knowledge has not yet taken place. Based upon the date and place of manufacture of the Start Point nd, however, there is an historical basis for the suggestion it derived from a shipwreck. The 14th century date corresponds to the period of establishment of regular maritime trade between the Mediterranean and North Western Europe (Spain, France, England and the Netherlands). Merchant sailors from Venice dominated much of this sea borne trade, and their extensive trading ventures resulted in the distribution of a wide range of commodities from the eastern Mediterranean (Levant) to the European ports, including Southampton and London. Perhaps during one such trading voyage a Europen-bound merchant ship was lost off the south Devon coast, and it was from the sunken wreck site of this vessel that the Mamluk-period earthenware bottle came. Figure 3 Description and identification of the ceramic bottle [page 44 / blank] medieval ceramics Reviews [page 46 / blank] David Gaimster The historical archaeology of pottery supply and demand in the Lower Rhineland, AD 14001800: an archaeological study of ceramic production, distribution and use in the city of Duisburg and its hinterland 2008 . Studies in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology 1, BAR International Series 1518 270 pages,131 figures, 8 data appendices, price 37.00 As is often the case with doctoral research topics, there is often a delay before a revised version appears in print. The authors study of the historical domestic ceramic market in the Lower Rhineland was completed in 1990, and submitted as a PhD thesis in 1991. Dr Gnter Krause provides in his preface to the book a forthright explanation for the subsequent delays in publication, which have been beyond the control of the author. There has been limited editorial revision to the thesis, but bibliographical references stop at 1999 (with a few exceptions). The platform for this study of regional manufacture and material consumption in the Lower Rhineland was provided by the pottery sequences from the large scale urban excavations conducted in the Duisburg Altstadt between 1980 and 1995 (under the direction of Dr Krause). Thanks to the directors enterprising mobilisa- tion of volunteers, most of the latrines, wells, waster pits and settlement layers from the Alter Markt and other sites could be stratigraphically excavated and recorded. Volunteers also participated in the post- excavation process, so that by 1990 the Duisburg archaeology unit was held in high regard for its scientic output and cost-effectiveness. This situation was not to last, for a variety of reasons given in Krauses preface noteworthy for its critical indictment of developments in Duisburg since 1999. This book begins with some scene-setting. Summaries of post-medieval ceramic research undertaken between 1850 and 1990 are organised according to ware (salt-glazed stoneware given the longest treatment, followed by lead-glazed earthenware and slipware, and briefer reviews of stove-tiles, tin- glazed earthenware, oriental and native porcelain, and Staffordshire newares). This is followed by statements on research strategy and methodology, and an account of the background to the excavations. Section 2 provides a more detailed description of the methodology adopted. The actual number of discrete datasets analysed is relatively small 51 stratied and associated groups of pottery from the Duisburg Altstadt, 32 similar groups from the hinterland of the Reviews 47 city and Lower Rhine area, and 12 contexts from published excavation reports of Lower Rhine sites (total 95; none post1989). Many have only been examined on a presence and absence basis (p 132). However, the purpose of this study is not the comprehensive description of all available ceramic assemblages that fall within the research period from the Altstadt excavations. Rather, it concentrates on these selected consumer assemblages in order to assess regional patterns in pottery marketing, fashion, status and function. The date range c AD 14001800 was dictated pragmatically by the large quantity of such material made available by the Duisburg excavations, and by authors desire to look at the speed and geographical extent of trends in ceramic consumption during the so-called transitional period of the 15th and 16th centuries (p 39). The earlier ceramics sequences excavated at Duisburg, dominated by Siegburg products from the mid-13th to the end of the 14th centuries, have been excluded from this study. A post-1400 ceramic-type series for Duisburg is dened and characterised in Section 3, and its forms are correlated with already published typologies. The British Museum agreed to complement its regional database on the chemical compositions of post-medieval Rhenish stove-tiles with Michael Cowells programmes of Neutron Activation Analysis of Lower Rhineland post-medieval ceramics, in particular regional lead-glazed wares, and the results are represented in Section 4. Chemical analysis was undertaken of just under 100 samples of lead-glazed earthenware and stove-tiles from excavations and museum collections in the Lower Rhineland (pp. 6776). As this element of the study is somewhat abstracted, detail on exactly what forms have been analysed is condensed while how the new analyses, which incorporates data on samples from waster groups from Kln, Mayen, Issum (slipwares) and Frechen, compare with datasets gathered by others, is not discussed. Section 5 provides a summary of the principal trends in regional ceramic production and distribution for the period covered by the book. Sections 6 and 7 discuss the relative composition of archaeological consumer assemblages on an intra-site basis (as demonstrated by excavations in Lbeck) and using an inter-site approach. Section 8 embraces a number of themes, from the organisation and mechanisms of regional pottery supply to ceramics as an index of consumer habit and social emulation. The fact that more recent contributions to such topics have since appeared in print for example, Ellmers (2004) on the organisation of the Frechen industry and the shipmasters and merchants engaged in the distribution of its wares does not devalue the value of this discussion. Future priorities advocated for socio-economic analysis include programmes of micro-topographic research (in Lower Rhineland towns) to link discarded artefacts with individual households, analysis of non-ceramic nds and multi-media studies of individual contexts on a 48 comparative basis. This is not the rst time that such aspirations have been proposed; how many times has it actually been achieved? Variations of this socio-historical approach to archaeological material culture have been conducted elsewhere for example the publication of 35% of cesspit complexes excavated between 19681996 in Deventer, Dordrecht, Nijmegen and Tiel (Bartels1999; reviewed in Medieval Ceramics 2223, 199899, 177 79). These however lack statistical data, and were but a sample. Constrained by time and the problem orientation of the research, material excavated since 1989 was not included in the Duisburg study. Nor was it possible in this study to assimilate the available archival information for Duisburg (one of the many proposals for the future that are cited), in the manner demonstrat- ed by Reichmann (1988) for the KrefeldLinn cellar group. This shortcoming is readily acknowledged by the author, and his interpretation of each assemblage and its socio-economic status is based on the archaeological evidence alone. The reader is consequently left uncertain about the reasons for some popular fashions failing to appear within the waste of certain households. Generalisations may hold true (and the statistics here are extremely interesting). For example, the period c 15751625 in particular witnessed a dramatic transformation in the composition of the ceramic assemblages, with the introduction of sophisticated earthenware for table use, to satisfy a discrete consumer niche and changes in dining habits. Dutch faience, oriental porcelain and English exports accounted for 46% of the pottery consumed in Duisburg during the second half of the 18th century (Staffordshire wares accounting for 20%), while for the same period in the hinterland Dutch faience increases, Chinese porcelain starts to appear, and English newares are marginally represented. However, the microhistories of individual assemblages offer a myriad of explanations, social trajectories and tempos, and these have yet to be addressed. The end product is an extremely useful characterisa- tion of regional ceramic consumption in the Duisburg area and assessment of the role that pottery has played be it functional, socio-behavioural and economic over a 400-year time span. The volume is well-produced and illustrated, notwithstanding a few typographical errors that are a by-product of the production process. Gaimster has admirably illustrated the potential of systematic, painstaking analysis of such late urban assemblages. The illustrations provide a useful source for comparative material, and Appendices facilitate cross-referencing of forms, features and sites (though use of ware codes rather than short names entails some work by the reader). The comment on page 43 that it is a pilot study, is telling, given the implications for as yet unpublished assemblages and the introductory comments made on pages 2024. We should be extremely grateful to the author for persevering to ensure that this version of his doctoral research has appeared in English in BAR (not the rst time this solution has been found: see Brown 2000, 99). This reviewer agrees with the authors own self- justication in his foreword (page 15) that it makes a timely contribution to the fast-emerging discipline of European historical archaeology and material culture studies. As an illuminating study of patterns and potential in the Lower Rhineland, it sets a bench- mark against which any future progress towards a true historical archaeology of pottery supply and demand in this region can be measured. Mark Redknap References Bartels, M Steden in scherven Cities in sherds. Vondsten uit beerputten in Deventer, Dordrecht, Nijmegen en Tiel (12501900) Finds from cesspits in Deventer, Doordrecht, Nijmegen and Tiel (1250 1900), SPA/ROB, Zwolle. Brown, D H Review of A. Gutirrez, Mediterranean Pottery in Wessex Households, BAR 306. Ellmers, D 2004, Die Aussagen dreier Bartmannskrge zur Schiffahrt um 1700, Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv 27, 28596. Reichmann, C 1988, Das Haushaltgeschirr des Syndikus Kpers um 1784, in J Naumann (ed), Keramik vom Niederrhein. Die Irdenware der Dppen- und Pottbcker zwischen Kuoln und Kleve, Kuoln, 12534. Rmy Guadagnin Fosses Valle de LYsieux: mille ans de production cramique en le-de-France . Volume 2 . Catalogue typo- chronologique des productions 2007 . Publications du CRAHM . Caen, 2007 735 pages, 478 figures including colour plates The sight of the huge volume brought back fond memories of my visit to the excavations at Fosses in August 1995. Id met Rmy Guadagnin in Paris in the morning and he took me out to see the site, where we arrived in time for lunch. I dont recall ever being more warmly welcomed at an excavation, and I still have on view a large photograph of a pile of in situ whiteware pots that was sent to me afterwards. My French has hardly improved since then, making a Reviews 49 thorough review of this mammoth work somewhat tricky, but the illustrations speak for themselves, and the general gist is easy to discern. This is the second of a two-volume set, the rst of which deals with the structural and stratigraphic evidence, while this considers the pottery. What pottery it is too! The kilns at Fosses are located almost 30 kilometres due north of Paris, on a tributary of the River Oise, where there seem to be good supplies of white-ring clay. The nature of that clay is explored in the introduction, as soon as page seven, on which there are tables setting out the chemical composition of various clay samples. Location and methodology are also considered in this opening chapter, and it is refreshing to see photographs of personnel trying to nd sherd ts. The caption De giganteques puzzles says it all. The following ve chapters discuss the pottery produced at Fosses in chronological order: Le haut Moyen ge, Le Moyen ge classique, Le bas Moyen ge, La Renaissance and LAncien Rgime. As the title says, a thousand years of pottery-making, that takes us through most of the traditions we are familiar with. Tenth century glazed, red-painted and plain whitewares, developed into a wider variety of forms in the twelfth century, including lamps, mortars and horns. Forms of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries included curfews and dripping pans among the range of jugs, jars and bowls, while the fteenth century saw the introduction of cups and socket- handled pipkins. As in many other places, the sixteenth century brought changes, with two-handled tripod cooking pots, chang dishes and fuming pots all making an appearance. The rst section in the chapter on the pottery of LAncien Rgime is entitled Stagnation, puis restructuration and this period is characterised by a simplication of products and a narrowing in the range of forms. The overall story may be easily told (although, with apologies, oversimplied here), but the telling of it in this volume is a masterpiece of technique and attention to detail. For one thing, the illustrations are superb. The line drawings are clearly presented, and there are hundreds of them, depicting vessel forms, the forms of component parts and techniques and motifs of decoration. Figure 161, for example, shows the methods of decorating a pot with red slip, which is actually shown as red and is all the more effective for it. Such an unsparing approach to depicting every detail is terric, and this is carried into the photographs, which are all excellent. They range from groups of vessels to close-ups of nger- prints in the surface of impressed clay. There are also plates of manuscript illuminations and other artworks where pottery has been represented. I imagine most of us would use this volume as a reference catalogue, and it will certainly be easy to do so. The pottery of each period is summarised in charts that illustrate the evolution of the main forms, a panorama synthtique that acts as a quick look-up guide. Within each period there is an introductory section discussing the background to pottery-making at the time. The products of specic kilns are then presented in separate sections, sub-divided by vessel type. Latelier 10.21, for instance, in Chapter Two, contains the following headings in the rst section: Les donnes chronologiques Les tendances gnrales de la production est leur evolution, Les ptes (The fabrics) and Les dcors peints. The following section on the earliest sequence of production for the kiln considers vessel groups and other elements: Les oules, Les cruches, Les pichets, Les formes ouvertes, Les formes rares et les dcors exceptionnels, Col atypique glaur and Dcors plastiques exceptionnels. It is very easy to nd your way around and to understand what is going on, especially when the illustrations are so well integrated with the text. This is more than a catalogue, however. It goes deeply into the composition of the assemblage, exploring particular idiosyncrasies among the pots, seeking to understand and illustrate specic techniques of manufacture and decoration, and pondering the wider issues that affected pottery- making. The overall aim seems to be to gain a close understanding of not just what the potters of Fosses produced at different times, but also how and why. This is really good archaeology. The nal chapter considers the distribution of the pottery in the le-de-France and Picardy. This is mainly comprised of an inventory of sites, rather than an extended discussion of quantitative evidence, and that might be the next stage in the huge task of putting the products of Fosses into context. That, perhaps, is not a job that will be completed by Rmy Guadagnin. He and his team have obviously worked hard to produce this extensive, thoroughly comprehensive and fabulously well presented book. It will be up to others now to use this to identify the products of Fosses on different sites in the region, and perhaps further aeld. There is no doubt this was very well-made pottery, and it may well have been taken considerable distances. I recommend this book not only as a very useful work of reference, but also as a demonstration of how to research and publish a huge kiln assemblage. The team at Fosses, I remember, were fond of Kenneth Branaghs lm Henry V. This glorious enterprise too, is a ne illustration of leading by example. Andreas Heege (editor) Topferofen pottery kilns fours de potiers: die Erforschung fruhmittelalterlicher bis neuzietlicher Topferofen (620 Jh) in Belgien, den Niederlanden, Deutchland, Osterreich und der Schweiz Basler Hefte zur Archaologie Volume 4 432 pages, 545 illustrations (line and black and white photographs), accompanying CD with images of 1795 pottery kilns, 60 When Andreas Heege emailed me to tell me that there was a new book on the pottery kilns of Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland about to be C published that might be of interest to MPRG I just knew that it had to be reviewed! This is an enormous multi-author extravaganza that has involved the work of at least 22 different people and is testament to the importance of the sort of work that is currently being carried out across Europe. Largely written in the authors native tongues the various papers are supported by a fantastic selection of photographs and illustrations and there is an important seven page summary in English by Andreas Heege which comes to some interesting and important conclusions. To top it all off the accompanying CD contains photographs and illustrations of 1795 pottery kilns! To those us ceramic specialists who have a particular interest in technology and manufacturing techniques this book is a godsend and I highly recommend it. Kevin Leahy Interrupting the pots: the excavation of Cleatham Anglo-Saxon cemetery This work is perhaps a perfect example of the difculties of attempting to carry out important archaeological research in the face of the somewhat grotesque imperatives of the modern heritage industry. It is a report on what is the third-largest Anglo-Saxon cremation cemetery ever to have been excavated in England. The site in question was excavated between 1984 and 1989, with the work carried out entirely by volunteers, often working in dreadful conditions. Between them, they rescued 1204 cremation urns and 62 inhumations, with an estimated 260-odd burials lost to the plough by the time of excavation. If not for the intervention of Kevin Leahy and his team, the entire cemetery would by now have probably been ploughed away, and would exist only as smashed pots, scattered bones and metal fragments in the topsoil, with the only possible record of this extremely important site perhaps being a distribution plot of unstratied non-ferrous objects, assuming that the nders had bothered to report them. As anyone who has worked with early Anglo-Saxon pottery will know, the area of chronology is one with many uncertainties. This site offers, perhaps for the rst time in many years, a key to its understanding. Its unusual topography meant that burial had taken place is a very limited area, and thus many urns were inserted into places were others had already been buried, resulting in long stratigraphic sequences, and an unparalleled opportunity to establish a reliable, dated typological series for cremation urns. It is likely to be unique in this, especially when the attrition rate of buried archaeology in eastern England is taken into account. Some aspects of the post-excavation phase, such as the conservation of the metal nds, the drawing of the nds, the colour photographs, the cost of publication and the on-line archiving were aided with piecemeal grants from various private and public bodies, but the bulk of the project was again carried out by unpaid volunteers. The most glaring omission from the volume is a lack of any analysis of the cremated human bone as it proved impossible to raise funds for this crucial part of the project from any major public body. In the authors own words As Cleatham is the only phased, large Anglo-Saxon cemetery in England, if not in Europe, the failure of funding bodies to support this, the nal aspect of the project, can only be described as scandalous. I entirely agree. Kevin and his team have brought this site to publication on a shoe-string, for which they must be highly commended but it must now be a priority to all those working on the archaeology of this period to lobby for funding to complete the analysis of a site which appears crucial to our understanding of the archaeology of what is arguably the most important and denitely the least-understood period of post- Roman England. Kevin Leahys starting point with the analysis of the pottery is an overview of previous work on such material. He successfully identies most of the major aws in J N L Myres work, particularly the largely subjective nature of most of his classications of form, and his cleaning up of the decorative schemes utilized by early Anglo-Saxon potters. The main thrust of Leahys pottery analysis is the examination of the different aspects of the cremation urns (in terms of form, decoration etc) with respect to the stratigraphy, to allow the denition of a develop- mental sequence, and it established fairly convincingly that decorative style, in terms of the combination of motifs (incised decoration, bosses and stamping) is the most rewarding area for study. One small potential worry was the method which Leahy has used to establish stratigraphic associations between the urns; he states that problems were encountered in distinguishing archaeological features on the site and it was rarely possible to dene the edges of urn pits. In the case where one urn cut another, then a stratigraphic relationship of earlier and later is obviously established, but the worry is with his associated urns. Basically, if two urns were found close together with their bases at the same level, then they were assumed to have been buried together, and thus contemporary. On a site were identication of archaeological features was extremely difcult, and where the urns were packed in far more densely than is normal, it is surely possible that non-contemporary urns would end up close together. However, once his developmental stylistic sequence was established, it was tested by plugging-in the dates of diagnostic 50 artefacts found with the urns, and these suggest that his use of associated urns in the matrix worked; early artefact types generally occur with early style urns, and so on. There is also the problem of multiple burials in the same urn. The fact that a fairly high proportion of Anglo-Saxon cremations contain the bones of more than one individual suggests that there was at least in some cases a time lapse between the insertion of the two individuals and nal burial. The fact that no funding was forthcoming for the analysis of the cremations means that any possibility of identifying urns containing more than one individual was not possible, despite the implications that this may have. This aside, the production of a developmental sequence of decoration was achieved, and it has thrown up some fascinating results, not least of which is the fact that wheel-thrown and kiln red Romano-British pottery was still in use, and perhaps even still being made, in the late 5th century, and the implication that some Romano-British cremation cemeteries, or at least some of the burials in them, are in fact sub-Roman. Not all the urns at the site could be accommodated by Leahys classication, but an impressive 96.5% were; importantly, he also analysed the urns from other cremation cemeteries in eastern England and found that in all cases, the majority of the urns would t into his classication, with over 80% of all but one of the cemeteries accommodated. Clearly, this work signies real progress in the classication of decorated early Anglo-Saxon pottery. There are problems, but not of the analysts making. It has been shown in the past by Richards (1987) that there are grounds to suspect that the size, shape and style of Anglo-Saxon cremation urns were inuenced by the age and gender of those contained within them. Thus, it is entirely possible, that within Leahys runs of contemporary urns, we are seeing differentiated age/gender considerations, or indeed single/multiple burials. As there was no funding for skeletal analysis, there is simply no way of knowing if this is the case. At the end of the book, Leahy ags up a number of aspects of the analysis of the excavated material that he was unable to carry out due to the lack of nancial support. Correspondence Analysis of the urns and the contained artefacts is agged up, and a similar analysis of the age and gender of the deceased with the decorative styles of their burial containers would doubtless also prove useful. Lack of time and funding also precluded spatial analysis and scientic dating. This is all understandable in the light of the problems which were encountered during the process of bringing this important site to publication. This is a remarkable report, not merely for the important conclusions reached, but also for that fact that it was brought to publication with virtually no help from those national bodies charged with the distribution of public funds in archaeology. Simply bringing a project of this size and complexity to publication in such circumstances is an achievement for which Kevin and his team should be warmly congratulated, and indeed, thanked. It is certainly a valuable, and perhaps crucial step forward in the understanding of Anglo-Saxon cremation pottery, and it is to be hoped that in future, the work for which Kevin was unable to obtain funding will be carried out. The main thrust of Leahys pottery analysis is the examination of the different aspects of the cremation urns (in terms of form, decoration etc) with respect to the stratigraphy, to allow the denition of a developmental sequence, and it established fairly convincingly that decorative style, in terms of the combination of motifs (incised decoration, bosses and stamping) is the most rewarding area for study. One small potential worry was the method which Leahy has used to establish stratigraphic associations between the urns; he states that problems were encountered in distinguishing archaeological features on the site and it was rarely possible to dene the edges of urn pits. In the case where one urn cut another, then a stratigraphic relationship of earlier and later is obviously established, but the worry is with his associated urns. Basically, if two urns were found close together with their bases at the same level, then they were assumed to have been buried together, and thus contemporary. On a site were identication of archaeological features was extremely difcult, and where the urns were packed in far more densely than is normal, it is surely possible that non-contemporary urns would end up close together. However, once his developmental stylistic sequence was established, it was tested by plugging-in the dates of diagnostic artefacts found with the urns, and these suggest that his use of associated urns in the matrix worked; early artefact types generally occur with early style urns, and so on. There is also the problem of multiple burials in the same urn. The fact that a fairly high proportion of Anglo-Saxon cremations contain the bones of more than one individual suggests that there was at least in some cases a time lapse between the insertion of the two individuals and nal burial. The fact that no funding was forthcoming for the analysis of the cremations means that any possibility of identifying urns containing more than one individual was not possible, despite the implications that this may have. This aside, the production of a developmental sequence of decoration was achieved, and it has thrown up some fascinating results, not least of which is the fact that wheel-thrown and kiln red Romano- British pottery was still in use, and perhaps even still being made, in the late 5th century, and the implication that some Romano-British cremation cemeteries, or at least some of the burials in them, are in fact sub-Roman. Not all the urns at the site could be accommodated by Leahys classication, but an impressive 96.5% were; importantly, he also analysed the urns from other cremation cemeteries in eastern England and found that in all cases, the majority of the urns would t into Reviews 51 52 his classication, with over 80% of all but one of the cemeteries accommodated. Clearly, this work signies real progress in the classication of decorated early Anglo-Saxon pottery. There are problems, but not of the analysts making. It has been shown in the past by Richards (1987) that there are grounds to suspect that the size, shape and style of Anglo-Saxon cremation urns were inuenced by the age and gender of those contained within them. Thus, it is entirely possible, that within Leahys runs of contemporary urns, we are seeing differentiated age/gender considerations, or indeed single/multiple burials. As there was no funding for skeletal analysis, there is simply no way of knowing if this is the case. At the end of the book, Leahy ags up a number of aspects of the analysis of the excavated material that he was unable to carry out due to the lack of nancial support. Correspondence Analysis of the urns and the contained artefacts is agged up, and a similar analysis of the age and gender of the deceased with the decorative styles of their burial containers would doubtless also prove useful. Lack of time and funding also precluded spatial analysis and scientic dating. This is all under-standable in the light of the problems which were encountered during the process of bringing this important site to publication. This is a remarkable report, not merely for the important conclusions reached, but also for that fact that it was brought to publication with virtually no help from those national bodies charged with the distribution of public funds in archaeology. Simply bringing a project of this size and complexity to publication in such circumstances is an achievement for which Kevin and his team should be warmly congratulated, and indeed, thanked. It is certainly a valuable, and perhaps crucial step forward in the understanding of Anglo-Saxon cremation pottery, and it is to be hoped that in future, the work for which Kevin was unable to obtain funding will be carried out. Paul Blinkhorn References Richards, J D, 1987, The Signicance of the Form and Decoration of Anglo-Saxon Cremation Urns. Brit Archaeol Rep Brit Ser 166. Clive Orton (editor) The pottery from medieval Novgorod and its region: the archaeology of medieval Novgorod . Volume 1 UCL Press . 234 pages British archaeologists, at least most of those of my acquaintance, know that Novgorod is a big medieval town in Russia where excavations of extraordinary longevity have uncovered a lot of wood. There are wooden houses and streets, wooden documents and a wide range of wooden artefacts. Novgorod was also important as a place where trade routes converged, including those between Scandinavia, western and central Europe and the Near East. According to Mark Brisbane, the editor of the Archaeology of Medieval Novgorod Series, the import-ance of Novgorod to the study of both early Rus and the development of Europe cannot be over-emphasised. It is probably true to say also that the importance of the excavations in the progress of archaeology is fundamental. Work began in 1932, and has continued virtually every year since. Archaeology in Soviet times suffered its own peculiar trials and tribulations, but the post-Glasnost coming together of the British and Russian team that is working on this series signals the value of this project on many levels, not least the breaking down of cold war barriers. This collaboration has been working for over ten years now, and The pottery from medieval Novgorod and its region is the rst in a series that will include volumes on other artefacts and environmental material. The political signicance of this publication should be borne in mind as we consider the contents of this slim but hefty volume. For some Russian archaeologists this is a long-awaited opportunity to communicate their ndings to a wide audience, and that alone is to be welcomed. It is not clear why the pottery should be the rst thing to be published. Of all the wonderful nds from Novgorod the ceramics do not seem to stand out. Even after working through the ten chapters presented here by a variety of authors, it is hard to grasp any sort of overall picture of what pottery actually meant to the inhabitants of Novgorod, nor what it represents and contributes to the study of medieval north-west Russia. It is also difcult to gain any sense of importance to the study of early Rus or the development of Europe, which may be difcult to over-emphasise, but should be brought out somehow. Perhaps the numerous authors are part of the problem, because it is rarely easy to nd coherency or continuity in a collection of separate articles. There are two papers with an introductory avour. Mark Brisbane and Clive Orton present The Reviews 53 study of medieval ceramics from North-West Russia: a view from the West in the rst chapter, and Orton again offers Handling large urban assemblages and their statistics as Chapter 6. In between, and thereafter, we are treated to a further eight, more specic chapters grouped under various headings. In Chapter 1, Brisbane and Orton point up the differences between approaches to ceramic studies in western Europe (mainly Britain) and the more processual line followed in Russia. The effects of Soviet isolation on academic communication are now well known, and those differences are no surprise, so there is little point in focussing on them here. The authors, to their credit, pass no comment either. They simply describe the present position and it is apparent that one aim of their project is to enable communication with other specialists. The contribution from David Gaimster, on the German stoneware, exemplies that purpose. The rst group of papers, Chronology and Technology includes four articles dealing with pottery from the towns of Novgorod, Ryurik Gorodishche, and Pskov. Each of them combines to provide an understanding of which pottery types came and went in the region between the 10th and 16th centuries. These chapters are essentially descriptive, and there are few attempts to consider what prompted observed changes, or how the pottery might have been used. The nal effect is to leave one wondering why this should be of interest to archaeologists working much beyond the Baltic region, but they are all well-ordered and thorough pieces of work. Chapter 6, Ortons consideration of the statistical approaches, provides a partial response, for if nothing else, he brings the problems facing Russian ceramicists into sharp focus. At Novgorod, one seasons excavations alone produced 247,000 sherds, and even if that is only around 60 sherds per cubic metre, that is still a lot to work through. It is no surprise to nd that ceramicists are still getting to grips with the daunting task of characterisation. This in part explains the less than contemplative approach of those who have worked on this material, and the following article by O A Rud, An attempt to classify the decoration of Novgorod medieval pottery using material from Troitsky excavation XI (Spits 2210), is a case in point. It seems we might have to wait a bit longer, and certainly until the rest of the evidence can be brought to bear, before interpretation will really take off. Ortons paper and the one that follows are grouped under the heading Methodology, and it is here that the peculiarities arising from a project of such extraordinary longevity are most pointed. It is unlikely that statistical analysis of pottery sherds was on the minds of those who, in the 1930s, initiated the spit-digging approach to this rich and complex site. Orton demonstrates that the application of statistics can, as he puts it, bring out previously unexpected features of the data, the explanation of which should lead to further under- standing of the role of ceramics in Novgorod. The subsequent classication of decorative techniques and motifs should therefore be recognised as the rst step in ordering the data to allow more profound enquiry. The nal group of three papers is headed International contacts. This includes a paper by David Gaimster entitled Pottery imported from the West: reception and resistance, I V Volkovs consideration of amphorae from Novgorod and V Y Koval on Eastern pottery from the excavations at Novgorod. These papers may be of interest to a wider audience than those dealing with local products, not least because they touch on the universal themes of long-distance exchange mechanisms and the various requirements of traders and consumers. A biblio-graphical index to publications on pottery from the Ilmen region and medieval Novgorod forms a nal section, followed by the references and index. There is also a CD-ROM with six appendices to a few of the papers. These are data les in Microsoft Excel or text le formats. Not all of them appear to have keys, and are therefore of very limited value because the meaning of the data is not immediately apparent. The Experimental coding of a sample of pottery from the Troitsky XI excavations is profoundly obscure. It is supposed to complement Ortons Chapter 6, but there is no reference to it there. It would not be useful here to delve into the specic content of individual papers. All of them are well presented, with plentiful illustrations, tables and charts. The Russian texts were ably translated by Katherine Judelson, and read very well. A few colour plates would have been welcomed to give an idea of what the material actually looks like. That, perhaps, is the main issue. Novgorod remains a completely alien place to most of us, and many of you will probably be wondering why you should invest in this volume. Well, as discussed above, this is an important step in the collaborative project that brings together western European approaches to the discipline with local knowledge and experience. In those terms it is a success, mercifully untainted by any hint of patronage or competition. You could read this book in order to learn an awful lot about what the pottery of Novgorod and its region looked like, but that may not appeal to many of you. You should read this book to extend your understanding of the development of pottery studies on a wider scale. Parts of it may seem naive and simplistic to some of us, but we should take more time to pass judgement. Few of us can claim to understand fully the experiences of the Russian archae-ologists past and present who studied, or study, the archaeology of Novgorod. This collection adds up to an extensive statement of the approach to the subject and the current level of progress. As Volkov puts it the analysis at this time is, so far, only in its infancy. Indeed, the whole volume carries the avour of work being carried out with genuine pleasure, and if you allow yourself to enjoy its warmth and depth, then you cant help but look forward to the next instalment. Duncan H Brown [page 54 / blank] medieval ceramics News 56 President Maureen Mellor Vice President Mark Redknapp Secretary Anne Boyle Assistant Secretary Andrew Sage Treasurer Jane Holdsworth Assistant Treasurer Nigel Jeffries Editor Derek Hall List of Officers and Council of the Group 2004 Co-editor Stanley Cauvain Assistant Editor Chris Jarret Regional Groups Officer Beverley Nenk Meetings Secretary Duncan Brown Continental Representative Frans Verhaege Irish Representative Clare McCutcheon Ordinary Members Barbara Hurmann John Hudson Anna Slowikowski News 57 Accounts for year ending 31 January 2005 receipts and payments account: General Fund income 2005 2004 subscriptions individuals 4045.00 3472.43 institutions 861.00 1214.23 publication sales 1 journals 1382.66 410.60 Minimum Standards sales 82.00 49.00 A Guide to Ceramic Forms sales 437.05 257.00 other 153.00 23.00 Conference 6113.45.00 545.00 investment income bank interest 199.85 98.73 other donations 220.00 792.00 grants 1480.00 960.00 loan 0 1000.00 John Hurst Fund 0 50.00 reciprocal mailing 80.00 75.00 total receipts 15054.46 8946.99 expenditure Conference 2003 0 115.00 Conference 2004 5446.43 500.00 journal publication 5140.15 5,733.66 advertising (leaflet costs) 0 495.15 postage 650.70 54.57 travel expenses 0 147.48 newsletter 736.71 280.01 website 70.36 107.39 guide costs 0 69.56 loan repayment 0 1,000.00 bank charges 0 30.00 subscriptions 65.00 63.00 Committee meetings expenses 90.00 0 membership cancellation 40.00 0 total expenditure 15054.46 2862.16 payments accrued from 200203 made in 200304 4700.26 net receipts for the year 2815.07 1384.57 monetary assets 2005 2004 bank balances 2 6644.10 4017.21 reserve fund 3 (English Heritage Publication Grant) 8920.00 8500.00 debtors publication sales 112.00 539.70 liabilities (General Fund) publication costs 0 2292.00 notes 1 Figure includes postal charges. 2 Royal Bank of Scotland current and deposit accounts, Euro and US dollar accounts, Alliance & Leicester account. 3 In Royal Bank of Scotland deposit account. 58 Regional Group Reports 2005 East Midlands Pottery Research Group No meetings were held in 2005. Contact Jane Young Lindsey Archaeological Services 25 West Parade Lincoln LN1 1NW telephone (01522) 544 554 London Area Medieval Pottery Research Group No meetings were held by the London Group in 2005. Contact Nigel Jeffries Museum of London Specialist Services 46 Eagle Wharf Road London Nl 7ED telephone (020) 7566 9312 North West Regional Medieval Pottery Research Group No meetings were held in 2005. Contact Julie Edwards Chester Archaeology 27 Grosvenor Street Chester CH1 2DD e-mail j.edwards@chestercc.gov. uk Scottish Group of Medieval Ceramicists Derek Hall reports on several projects: Redware sourcing Historic Scotland commissioned this follow-on to the pilot study of 1997, and project members have submitted the results of the ICPS analysis of brick, tile, pottery and clay samples, and produced a vessel typology. Perth High Street excavations A seminar was held on the imported pottery from the site in October 04, with several members of MPRG holding a round-table discussion on this important assemblage. Research continues. Monastic industrial sites A Historic Scotland funded gazetteer of potential monastic industrial sites across Scotland has concentrated on locating industrial production centres, including tileworks, and this will hopefully aid the future location of pottery production sites, as it appears to be possible that Scottish pottery manufacture started with the introduction of the major monastic orders in the 12th century. Ceres, Fife A potential pottery production centre making Scottish White Gritty Ware has been identified near Ceres, following a geophysical survey and thin-sectioning of sherds. Further fieldwork may take place later this year. Reids Pottery, Newbigging, Musselburgh George Haggerty has completed the catalogue of the products of this 19th century pottery, and has produced a visually illustrated catalogue of the assemblage form the site which should be seen as the way forward as regards the archiving of industrial ceramics. The disc is available from haggartyg@aol.com at the price of postage. Contact Derek Hall SUAT Ltd 55 South Methven Street Perth PH1 5NX telephone (01738) 622 393 e-mail dhall@suat.co.uk News 59 South East Midlands Pottery Research Group (SEMPER) East Anglian Pottery Research Group SEMPER is a thriving regional group, working closely with the East Anglian group. We try to hold two meetings a year, one of which is regularly held at the Buckinghamshire County Museum in Aylesbury and the other at various venues in the region. One meeting was held in 2004 and included talks on the medieval pottery of Hertfordshire; late medieval pottery kilns at Higham Ferrers, Northants, and Italian imports to Narrow Street, London. If anyone in the region (or outside!) has any ideas for themes for meetings, or perhaps would like to host a meeting, or would like to be put on the mailing list, please contact: Anna Slowikowski Albion Archaeology, St Marys Church, St Marys Street, Bedford MK42 0AS telephone (01234) 294 005 e-mail a.slowikowski@albion-arch.com South Central Medieval Pottery Research Group No meetings were held in 2005. Contact Lorraine Mepham Wessex Archaeology Portway House, Old Sarum Park Salisbury SP4 6EP telephone (01722) 326 867 South West Region Medieval Pottery Research Group Mike Ponsford for the South-West group reports that the annual experimental kiln project at Bickley ran, as usual, in August, organised by Oliver Kent and David Dawson. The most important project for future work is the publication of the Barnstaple kilns and pottery and this has been selected as of the highest importance, nationally and internationally, in the Regional Framework for the south-west. Contact Mike Ponsford 12 Seymour Road, Bishopston BristolBS7 9HR telephone (0117) 985 8109 Welsh Medieval Pottery Research Group No meetings were held in 2005. Contact Steve Sell c/o Glamorgan Gwent Archaeological Trust Ferrybridge Warehouse Bath Lane, Swansea SA1 1RD or Mark Redknap Dept Archaeology and Numismatics Natrional Museum and Gallery Cathays Park, Cardiff CF1 3NP telephone (02920) 573 223 60 Information and notes for contributors General points 1 The text should be of a length appropriate to its content (ie 3,000 4,000 words on average, unless greater length can be justied by the material and subject to peer review). 2 The paper must have an adequate summary of the contents (approximately 100 words). 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Do not use the ampersand (&) in text or in the references. 10 References to gures within the text should be in the form, for example, Figure 1.1. References to gures in the reference section should be in lower case, for example, Broadribb 1994, 600, g 6, no1. 11 For acronyms and other abbreviations using capital letters, standard international units of measure with no full-stop are used (for example, CBA, HMSO, HBMC; AD, BC, OD; m, mm, kg). News 61 12 Contractions (shortened forms which end with the last letter of the original word) are not followed by a full-stop (for example, Mr, Dr, St). 13 All foreign language expressions, abbreviations and terminology must be in italics (for example, in situ, ibid, c, ie, eg, et al, etc) 14 Compass points must be given in full (for example, south-east), in lower case. 15 Numbers one to twenty and any number starting a sentence should be written in full. Numbers over twenty should be given in numerals, as should those followed by units of measure (for example, 5 miles, 10 kg), with a space should be inserted between the unit and its measure. Percentages should be given in numerals followed by the % sign, not using words. Context numbers must be given in square brackets (for example, context [3]). 16 Dates (for example, 13th to 14th centuries) use normal and not superscript /subscript style, with the word century not C. Use a hyphen when a date is used as an adjective (for example, of a mid 13th-century date). For other types of dates, use, for example, c 14501460, AD 1225, AD 13201350 (use keystroke alt/option -. 17 Authors should note that their papers should contain References (not Bibliography). References should contain only those that have been cited in the body of the paper, either in the main text, specialist reports or appendices. As a matter of course, before the paper is sent to the Editorial Committee, the author should check that every text reference is included in the References and that every item listed in the References is referred to in the text. 18 Books The name of the publisher and the place of publication should be given, for example: Cruden, S 1986, Scottish Medieval Churches, 345. John Donald, Edinburgh. 19 Chapters in books Spearman, R M 1988 The Medieval Townscape of Perth, in Lynch, M, Spearman, M and Stell, G (eds) The Scottish Medieval Town, 42 59. John Donald, Edinburgh. 20 Theses Torrie, E P D 1988 The Guild in Fifteenth century Dunfermline, unpubl PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. 21 Articles Woolliscroft, D J 1993 Signalling and the design of the Gask Ridge system, Proc Soc Antiq Scot, 123, 291313. MacAskill, N L 1987 Ceramic building material, in Holdsworth, P (ed) Excavations in the Medieval Burgh of Perth 197981, 1567. Edinburgh (= Soc Antiq Scot Monogr Ser, 5). Hall, D W 1997 The Pottery, in Rains, M J and Hall, D W (eds) Excavations in St Andrews 198089, 2630. Glenrothes (= Tayside Fife Archaeol Committee Monogr 1). Hodgson, G W I 1983 The animal remains from medieval sites within three burghs on the eastern Scottish seaboard, in Proudfoot, B (ed) Site, environment and economy, 332. Oxford (= BAR Int Ser 173). 22 Titles of foreign journals should be given in full, but British and Irish journals can be abbreviated, for example, Medieval Archaeol, Tayside Fife Archaeol J. 23 Publication years for a journal should only be included after the journal title where the volume covers a split year, for example, 197172. 24 Documentary sources should be given their full archive number and repository. 25 Maps should be identied by their full title in the reference list. 26 Footnotes should never be used and references should appear in the text as, for example, Torrie 1988 or as Torrie has stated (1988, 54). 27 Histograms and other graphics should be listed as gures. 28 Figures and Plates should be referred to in the text as, for example, Figure 1 and Plate 1 (normal text). All gures and plates must have a caption, for example, Figure 1 Location map. If there is no scale in the illustration, a note of the scale at which the illustrations have been reproduced should be included in the caption. If the artwork is not by the author, the illustrator or photographer must be acknowledged, either in the caption or in the acknowledgements (for example, referring to Figure 1.113). Captions must be listed sequentially at the end of the contribution. 62 Illustrations 1 The rst impressions of a publication are often gained from the illustrations. While the editors will decide nal page layouts, they cannot undertake to redraw maps or gures, and will reject artwork which is not of a sufci- ently high standard. For this reason, photocopies only of proposed illustrations should be submitted in the rst instance. 2 Page layouts may be specied by the author, but these should bear in mind that half- or whole-page artwork (which may include two or more gures) are signicant- ly cheaper than quarter-page inserts. 3 All pottery illustrations submitted for publication must be made according to standard archaeological conventions, with the section indicated on the left-hand side of the vessel and the handle on the right (unless there is more than one handle). For wheelthrown vessels, the section should be lled in with black ink; for hand- made pots, a hatched section is permissible. Added features, such as spouts, secondary handles, or applied decoration, should also be hatched or not lled in, to show that they are not part of the original vessel as formed. 4 All artwork must be designed to t the Medieval Ceramics page size (248 x 172 mm) or single column width (82 mm). As a rule, pottery drawings should be prepared for reduction at 1:4 or 1:2, but decorated sherds or unusual single vessels may be published at 1:1. 5 Pottery illustrations inked in at 1:1 for reduction to 1:4 should not be drawn with a pen less that 0.5 mm for outline, or 0.3 mm for detail. Spaces between lines should be sufcient not to cause blacking-in when the drawings are reduced, particularly if sections are hatched. 6 Lettering and numbering should be of an appropriate scale and consistently placed; care should be taken to ensure that labels are accurately aligned. 7 All maps and gures showing pottery should have an unobtrusive scale. Maps must have a north-point. 8 Final artwork should be submittedf as TIFF files at a resolution of 600 dpi (dots pore inch) for line drawings (including those with areas of tone) and 300 dpi for photographs. 9 Authors must make sure that permission to reproduce illustrations has been granted in writing by the copyright holder.