Abstract
This contribution summarises our present state of knowledge about Scottish Neolithic pottery, emphasising its dual origins in the Continental Middle Neolithic ceramic traditions of Brittany and the northernmost part of France, and tracing the subsequent expansion in its use within Scotland and some of the complexities of its developmental trajectories. The dynamics behind these developments are considered, including the patterns of inter-regional contacts (both within and beyond Scotland) that were established and perpetuated during the fourth millennium BC. The significance of the emergence of Grooved Ware pottery in Orkney towards the end of that millennium, and its rapid and widespread adoption elsewhere, is explored.
Keywords: Scotland, Neolithic, pottery, Castellic, Carinated Bowl, Impressed Wares, Unstan, Grooved Ware, pottery terminology, ceramic traditions
Introduction
Some 29 years ago, in the spring of 1987, I was commissioned by David Clarke to write a report on the Grooved Ware pottery from his excavations at Links of Noltland, Orkney (ultimately published as Sheridan 1999), and that is the reason why I came to Scotland from Belfast, where I had previously researched Irish Neolithic pottery. Following that three-month contract, I was fortunate enough to be appointed as a curator in the Archaeology Department of what is now called National Museums Scotland and it has been a privilege to work with David, in one capacity or another, ever since then. This contribution, summarising our current understanding of Scottish Neolithic pottery, is offered in gratitude to David for having encouraged and supported my research over all these years. In its subject matter, it echoes David’s own tribute to his Museum mentor, Robert Stevenson (Clarke 1983).
Perhaps surprisingly, there has been no attempt to present an overall narrative of Scottish Neolithic pottery – other than a summary statement by Ian Kinnes in 1985 – since Isla McInnes published her brief review in 1969, nearly half a
century ago (McInnes 1969). There have indeed been some studies of specific ceramic traditions (including Henshall 1983a on the north-east Scottish variant of Carinated Bowl pottery, Sheridan 2007 on Carinated Bowl pottery more generally, Cowie & MacSween 1999 on Grooved Ware, MacSween 2007 on Impressed Wares and Grooved Ware and Copper 2015 on Hebridean Neolithic pottery), and reviews of certain regional developments (eg Scott 1964 on pottery in south- west and western Scotland, Cowie 1993a on early to mid-Neolithic pottery in east central Scotland and Sheridan 2014a on Shetland Neolithic pottery), but no attempt has been made to define the ‘big picture’ or to explore the dynamics of ceramic developments in Neolithic Scotland in any detail. The brief contribution to the Scottish Archaeological Research Framework (ScARF) that appeared in 2013 (http://www.scottishheritagehub.com/content/51-ceramics, accessed 20.3.16) merely offered some pointers.
The time is ripe, however, to attempt this ambitious review. In the 47 years since McInnes’ study, the amount of Scottish Neolithic pottery has increased enormously, with the Orcadian Late Neolithic sites of Links of Noltland, Pool and Ness of Brodgar alone having produced challengingly large assemblages comprising many thousands of sherds. Developer-funded excavations have filled in some geographical gaps, for example in North and South Ayrshire (eg Maybole: Sheridan 2009b), and have also confirmed the relatively high density of Early Neolithic assemblages in parts of Aberdeenshire and around the Moray Firth (eg; Lochrie 2010; MacSween 2008; Sheridan 2014b; further examples have recently been discovered as a result of the Aberdeen by-pass roadwork project). Furthermore, many assemblages are associated with reliable radiocarbon dates, allowing us to form a better (albeit far from perfect) picture of chronological developments; and Professor Alasdair Whittle’s current radiocarbon dating project,
The Times of their Lives, has been transforming our understanding of the genesis
and development of Grooved Ware in Orkney (MacSween et al 2015; Richards et al in press). Our understanding of the use of Scottish Neolithic pottery has also advanced significantly, with the recent application of lipid analysis having revealed evidence for the use of dairy products as well as meat from the earliest Carinated Bowl pottery and from its ceramic successors (Cramp et al 2014).
Constructing a broad overview, and defining the various regional and chronological trajectories that lend detail to it, is also desirable as a way of achieving greater clarity and consistency in nomenclature; terminology matters because it influences the way we interpret the past. Over the years, a plethora of terms have sprouted up, ranging from the regionally-specific, such as ‘Beacharra Ware’ (Piggott 1954, 170-3), ‘Rothesay style’ (Scott 1977), and ‘Unstan Ware’ (Callander & Grant 1934, 335), to descriptors of specific pot types (‘Unstan Bowl’: Henshall 1963, 106-9; ‘Achnacree Bowl’: Henshall 1972, 100-2), and to broader categories such as ‘Impressed Wares’ (Gibson 2002; MacSween 2007), ‘Carinated Bowl’ (Sheridan 2007) and ‘Bowl’ (Kinnes 1985), in addition to the more archaic ‘Western Neolithic’ and ‘Grimston/Lyles Hill Ware’ (both cited in Alexander 2000). Some of these terms (eg ‘Beacharra Ware’, ‘Rothesay Ware’ and ‘Unstan Ware’) mask the fact that certain elements in the ceramic repertoire have a supra-regional distribution. Kinnes’ term ‘Bowl’, while admirable in its neutrality, runs the risk
of being too imprecise; ‘Grimston/Lyles Hill’ conflates two variants of Carinated Bowl pottery; and ‘Western Neolithic’ is a throwback to Childean broad-brush European ceramic categorisation. Unfortunately, however, there is no ideal set of terms to use. Essentially, the people who made the pottery were not doing so for the benefit of future researchers constructing ceramic typochronologies, even though their choices in design and manufacture will have been anything but random. But what modern researchers can try to do – whatever terminology is used – is to characterise the ceramic traditions that were kept alive by generations of potters and to investigate the ways in which those traditions changed, and the possible reasons for those changes. This requires tacking, in geographical perspective, from the local to the large scale in order to identify divergences and convergences in trajectories over time. It also requires an understanding of the broader context of Neolithic developments within which these ceramic trajectories were situated.
This contribution will begin by outlining the earliest pottery to appear in Scotland. It will then trace the geographical expansion in pottery use and the various regional trajectories that can be traced, highlighting where these reveal evidence for the inter-regional sharing of design ideas. The final section will address the issue of Grooved Ware pottery, ‘as an invented Orcadian tradition and will explore reasons for its widespread adoption elsewhere in Britain and Ireland.
Beginnings
The currently-available evidence indicates that the earliest pottery to appear in Scotland belongs to two discrete, well-established Continental ceramic traditions that were in use in different parts of northern France during the late fifth and early fourth millennia, and that its appearance relates to two strands of Neolithisation through small-scale colonisation, as discussed at length elsewhere (eg Sheridan 2010a; 2013).
The first tradition (Fig 1) is that of Late Castellic (and associated) pottery, as used mostly in the Morbihan area of south-east Brittany during the local Middle Neolithic II (Cassen 2000). This is currently represented, in its earliest Scottish manifestation, only at Achnacreebeag, Argyll and Bute, on the west coast although its current unique status can only be a function of archaeological happenstance; there is a pressing need for fieldwork to locate the settlement sites, and to explore the other closed megalithic chambers and simple passage tombs that will have been associated with this Atlantic façade strand of Neolithisation in this part of Scotland. The closed bipartite form of the most complete of the Achnacreebeag pots, together with its ‘rainbow’ arc design surmounting a fringe of short vertical lines, the thinness of its walls and the fineness of its fabric, are absolutely typical of Late Castellic pottery as found in the Morbihan and also (as a northerly outlier) at Vierville in Normandy (Fig 5.3). The issue of the dating of the Achnacreebeag pottery has been discussed elsewhere (eg Sheridan 2010a); essentially, in the absence of relevant radiocarbon-datable material from the findspot context, we currently have to rely on the dating evidence for Late Castellic pottery in Brittany and Normandy (Cassen et al 2009, 761, fig 13). This places the likely date of its appearance in Scotland at some point between c 4300 BC and c 3900 BC (pace Whittle et al 2011, 850).
The second (Fig 2), which this author terms the ‘Carinated Bowl’ tradition (Sheridan 2007), can be related to the pottery found in and around the Nord- Pas de Calais region in the centuries around 4000 BC (eg at Étaples: Praud 2015) – that is, during the local Middle Neolithic II. This constitutes a mixture of elements from the Chassey and Michelsberg traditions. The existence of such ‘Chasséo-Michelsberg’-like pottery, and its regionally-variable expressions (eg the Spiere group in Belgium: Vanmontfort 2001), is increasingly being accepted on the Continent, and it appears that the ‘Carinated Bowl’ tradition seen in our archipelago constitutes one such regional variant that had emerged in the area closest to the south-east English coast. The geographical extent of the earliest form of this Carinated Bowl pottery in Scotland was mapped by the current author in 2007 (Sheridan 2007, fig 1), and subsequent finds have merely reinforced this distributional pattern. It seems to have appeared at various points along the eastern coast of Scotland, with particular concentrations in the fertile agricultural lands of south-east Scotland and around Aberdeenshire, Moray and the Moray Firth; an early variant form is known from as far north as Camster Long in Caithness (Henshall 1997). It is also present in south-west and western Scotland as far north as Islay; and if, as suspected, there had been a rapid westerly and south- west spread of the colonising farmers who made this pottery, then one major route will have been the Forth-Clyde river systems, to judge from the cluster of finds in South Lanarkshire (eg at Biggar Common: Sheridan 1997). The main features of this ceramic tradition – which shows a marked and geographically- widespread consistency in its earliest form, in both design and manufacture – have been described in detail elsewhere (eg Sheridan 2007; 2009a) so do not need to be repeated here, other than to recall that uncarinated forms are present alongside various kinds of carinated and S-shaped forms; that the pottery has been skilfully made, with some vessels having walls as thin as 4mm; and that coarseware, while present, tends to constitute a minor part of the repertoire. As
Figure 1. The Late Castellic decorated bipartite bowl from Achnacreebeag, Argyll and bute. The map suggests the route taken by the putative groups of immigrant Breton farmers, with the northernmost tip of the arrow indicating the location of Achnacreebeag. Photo © National Museums Scotland; map from Sheridan 2010a
for the date of its appearance in Scotland, there are now a considerable number of relevant radiocarbon dates. Bayesian modelling of these dates for Alasdair Whittle’s
Gathering Time project (Whittle et al 2011, 822-4) concluded that, for Scotland
south of the Great Glen, Carinated Bowl pottery appeared in 3825-3750 cal BC
(at 95% probability; 3810-3775 cal BC at 68% probability). However, as remarked
elsewhere (Sheridan 2012a), any such modelling depends on the ability to define an end to the phenomenon being modelled, and since we know that the process of style drift from ‘traditional’ to ‘modified’ Carinated Bowl occurred at different rates and in different ways in different areas, one needs to bear in mind Whittle et al’s dictum that a dating model is only as good as the assumptions that are fed into it. Be that as it may, it is clear that this kind of pottery was being made in Scotland by c 3800 BC.