Author: andersons

ORP: Ipswich Ware Urn

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Several angles of the Ipswich ware urn

Context 

This object is an Ipswich ware urn that dates back to Early Medieval England. It was crafted in Ipswich, Suffolk, a port town near the site of the Sutton Hoo burial. During the seventh and eighth centuries, underwent much expansion and economic growth as a result of its role in the North Sea trading network. It is perhaps because of that growth that a group of Frisian potters were drawn to Ipswich to found a crafting enclave around the year 700, which produced ceramic wares for approximately one hundred and fifty years.

The wares that the Frisian potters produced were very economically successful, as evidenced by how far they spread across the region. One example of how prevalent these wares became in Anglo-Saxon society can be found at the archaeological site of the West Stow Village. Excavations at West Stow, which was a rural farming community, found that the proportion of potsherds that were from Ipswich wares matched the proportion of potsherds from more local wares.

One of the main things that differentiates Ipswich wares from the traditional Anglo-Saxon wares that predate them are the fact that they were made by specialized and dedicated crafters, rather than farmers who had a broader array of skills and split their labor between a variety of tasks. Additionally, the Frisian potters had better clay and tools at their disposal when crafting the wares, as crafters were often higher status than farmers. Ipswich wares were made using turntables, and were therefore more regular in form than the traditional wares that were created purely by hand. Additionally, Ipswich wares were fired in kilns, which are more easily controlled than the bonfires used for traditional firing.

Overall, the Ipswich ware urns represent a technological advancement in pottery, while also demonstrating that at least one part of Britain had recovered enough from the collapse of the Roman occupation to attract foreign crafters for long periods of time.

Process

I chose to attempt to digitally reconstruct this urn, since I felt that it would challenge me more than creating a physical reconstruction in the College’s pottery studio. The modeling software I used is called Agisoft PhotoScan, which uses a volume of photographs of an object from as many angles as possible to create a three-dimensional model of the object.

The first step was uploading the pictures of the urn into Photoscan into two separate chunks, one of the top and higher angles, and the other of the bottom and lower angles. next, I aligned the chunks, then aligned both of their photos. After that I built dense clouds from the chunks, and a mesh from the dense clouds.

A view of the ‘model’ after the building of dense chunks

At this point, I was confused because I had done all the steps that I should have done, but nothing resembling an Ipswich ware urn had seemed to take shape. In curiosity, I began to mess with the display to see if there was anything that I was missing. As it turns out, there was.

My completed digital reconstruction, perhaps?

I was able to create a digital model of the urn, but because of both its remoteness from the center of the monitor and my own lack of experience with the software made it so that I was only able to view it from one angle.

Insights

Overall, my efforts to digitally reconstruct this urn suffered from my own lack of skill, and from low resolutions of rendering. This is comparable to how efforts towards physical reconstruction could have suffered lack of skill with the medium of clay, or from inferior tools or materials.

If I had made a physical model, I would have had a very different experience which would have most likely been a more successful one. There is almost more to be learned from failure than from success, so I do not regret attempting the digital reconstruction. This reconstruction process made me appreciate how difficult it can be to accomplish something that can seem simple and linear, as well as the frustration when a final product does not fulfill its intended function-both experiences that novice potters first learning how to craft Ipswich ware urns surely experienced 1300 years ago.

Particularly, my difficulties with viewing the model impressed upon me the importance of viewing your work from multiple angles, and even from a distance if possible, in order to take as much of it into consideration as you can.

Further Reading

Blinkhorn, Paul. “Stranger in a Strange Land: Middle Saxon Ipswich Ware” Accessed May 13, 2018.
http://www.academia.edu/401957/STRANGER_IN_A_STRANGE_LAND_MIDDLE_SAXON_IPSWICH_WARE.

 

Fleming, Robert. Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise: 400-1070. London: Penguin
Books, 2010.

West, Stanley. West Stow: The Anglo-Saxon Village. Ipswich, UK: Suffolk County Council, 1985

Craft Fair: Ceramics

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The table that I sat at during the portion of the Craft Fair when it was not raining cats and dogs was the ceramics table.

Hello!

The ceramic table displayed several examples of the ‘Anglo-Saxon funerary urns’ that my classmates and I had made in the College’s pottery studio early in the term, as a means of striving towards a holistic method of understanding material culture. Essentially, one of the best ways to learn about something, especially if that thing is traditionally hand-made, is to make it yourself, with your hands, and with as much of authentic materials and methods as you can achieve.

Students beginning to create coil pots

Students shaping and smoothing coil pots

Students decorating the outsides of their coil pots with patterns

Of course, there are limitations on the authenticity that can be achieved by a bunch of undergraduates an ocean and a millennium away from the original makers of the crafts. However, through our time in the pottery studio we were at least able to gain an appreciation for the amount and work and skill that goes into making in a lumpy, asymmetrical pot.

Like traditional pots from this period, the pots that we made were coil pots. This kind of pot is easy to make, even for a person as unskilled as me and my classmates or an unspecialized Medieval farmer. Making a coil pot involves creating a flat, circular base and coiling thick strings of clay around the perimeter of that base. The layers of coils are smoothed and blended as they are stacked, and the length of each layered coil controls the radius of each part of the finished pot. In the case of funerary urns, this results in a curvy shape that is narrow at the base, wide in the middle and tapers at the top before flaring outward at the lip.

an example of a traditional Anglo-Saxon funerary urn, from a crematory site in Suffolk

Coil pots are made without the usage of a pottery wheel, and usually without the usage of a turn table, so they tend to end up being lumpy and/or asymmetrical within both the archaeological record and college pottery studios. Traditionally, these pots were fired in bonfires rather than in kilns, and were not finished with a glaze like many modern wares, so they lack the shine and durability of many ceramics that would be found in a pottery shop today.

The urns that we made were also featured at other locations throughout the Craft Fair.

Some urns were used to weigh down the tarp under the body that was used for the mock burial at the end of the Craft Fair

One was used to hold quills at the calligraphy table

And another few were filled with ashes and placed around a mock crematory pyre

The ubiquity of ceramic vessels around the craft likely resembles how commonplace pottery would have been in rural Early Medieval Britain, as these wares were created on the household scale.

The interactive element of the Ceramics table consisted of quantities of play dough that I made from scratch with the help of a friend.

The play dough was made with common ingredients, and was pretty easy to make.

For one batch, we used two cups of flour, one cup of salt, four tablespoons of vinegar, two cups of water, three tablespoons of vegetable oil, and a bunch of chopped up grass from behind the house that held the kitchen we used. I also kneaded in a handful of ash from the fire during the craft fair.

Grass and ash are not usually used in play dough, but I decided to incorporate them as a way of mimicking how the clay used in creating traditional Anglo-Saxon pottery was ‘dirty’- containing fossils, ash, vegetative matter, and whatever else was in the ground where the farmers dug up their clay.

I also put food coloring in the play dough. This resulted in it being somewhat unfortunately flesh-colored, but also similar in color to the fired ceramics on the table.

measuring out ingredients…

mixing them over medium heat…

until a mass of play dough begins to form.

Spreading it out so that it can cool…

before balling it up so that it could be taken to the craft fair! This was one batch out of the three we made.

As a part of my exposition at the table, I would briefly discuss the nature of traditional Anglo-Saxon ceramics, talk about why and how our class made ours, and invite people to make coil pots using the play dough.

The table had few visitors (as did most of the craft tables, as an hour and a half into the craft fair it began to thunderstorm and all of the tables had to be covered. Most of the fair’s visitors came to the later half of the event, for food and for the mock burial. However, the people that did visit the table seemed to enjoy it.