Tag: Clay

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.

ORP: West Stow Cemetery Bowl

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Ancient Anglo-Saxons often buried their dead with grave-goods, which could range from simple beads to highly-decorated metal brooches. Pottery pieces were common throughout Anglo-Saxon graves and could usually be classified as highly decorated funerary urns or plain domestic pots. The piece pictured in Figure 1 was a bowl found in the cemetery of West Stow, an old Anglo-Saxon village that was active around the fifth to seventh century CE.

Figure 1

This is unfortunate in the fact that there wasn’t proper documentation of the items found in the cemetery, specifically the context in which they were found so it cannot be said for certain what the bowl was used for or with whom it was buried with. However, based on its shape, design, and size, it was more likely a food bowl. Domestic pots were repurposed as funeral urns, but in West Stow, there is only one unearthed pot that has been confirmed as a funeral urn. It is also less likely that this bowl was used as a cremation urn or storage vessel because of its large mouth opening unless there was some sort of lid, though there was never one confirmed in the records.

I used earthenware clay to make the reconstructed bowl. To start, I created a cylindrical base the size of my palm and then rolled out long snakes of clay. Building up the bowl is similar to a coil-pot, where you wrap the snakes around the top part of the previous layers, but then you must blend the layers together to eventually make one smooth wall. When I wrapped each coil in a circle, I first melded both ends of the clay snake together by smearing it with my thumb and some extra small pieces of clay. Once I had a smooth, uninterrupted circle, I used my thumb to smear the clay downwards to connect the clay with the base, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2

I continued this process around the base until the outside of the clay was smooth without any signs of folds. Once I was satisfied with the outside, I repeated this process on the inside of the coil, pushing my thumb downwards on the coil to connect it with the base. As I worked my thumb against the inner wall of the bowl, I cupped my hand on the outside wall so that I could control the formation of the overall shape of the bowl.

As I progressed with every layer, I placed the coil slightly outside of the last one so that the bowl would widen even more. As I reached the top, I purposely left the lip of the bowl uneven, as it was in the reference photos. I don’t believe this was a result of it being broken, as the color of the rim was as aged as the rest of the piece. The lip was also rounded, not jagged. However, my reconstructed bowl’s lip was much more exaggerated than the original.

West Stow Bowl’s Uneven Lip

Reconstructed Bowl’s Uneven Lip

At this point, I started to focus on smoothing out the outside wall, as it was riddled with my thumbprint indentations. I used some water to help smooth the rim and other areas of the bowl that were cracking. Any areas that were too thick I fixed with my thumb pushing on the inside wall and my palm on the outside wall, helping keep the shape of the bowl. Doing this, however, created some holes, which I easily remediated by covering with thin scraps of clay and smoothing out with the help of water.

West Stow Bowl Walls

Reconstructed Bowl’s Walls

Initially, I wasn’t sure what tool I should use to make the impressions in the bowl. I wasn’t sure if I should make a clay stamp or find an object with a similar shape to create the indentations. I found a file one of my peers was using for her bone-stamp carving that was similar enough, although the Anglo-Saxons probably did not use a steel file for this bowl. Upon further research, I found that it had a technique applied to it called rustication, and the indentations, which are spaced apart, were made with single impressions of the forefinger, the depression caused by the finger-tip. However, I made the mistake of letting the bowl dry for too long, and by the time I came back for indentations, the clay was too hard for me to modify. I tried to recreate the look of the Type 5 rustication by using a chisel, but I couldn’t quite replicate the work.

Failed attempt at replicating the rustication

I instead did the impressions on a small, fresh piece of clay to at least get the feel for the technique.

Rustication on a piece of clay

My re-creation of the bowl was created with as many of the same techniques the Anglo-Saxons used as I had knowledge of. It is by no means a perfect reproduction; the base of the bowl is supposed to be a wide, flat bottom that curves up immediately, whereas my bowl has a clear, circular base with walls that go out then up. The indentations are not exactly how I would have liked them to turn out, either. It was difficult interpreting the written text explaining how the indentation was made; also, my fingers are not as large as the ceramicist who made the original bowl were. Due to time constraints, I could not double fire my bowl, although I don’t think this is too important to the authentic process. Firing is done in an electric kiln, something the Anglo-Saxons didn’t have in their arsenal. There was no evidence of firings done at West Stow, so it is more likely that they were instead done in large, bonfire-like conditions.

Old Anglo-Saxon pots are often described as crude and unrefined, which is something I and the rest of the class though initially when looking at Anglo-Saxon pottery. However, the model-making process has taught me that everything is harder to make than it looks, especially when considering that people in the past didn’t have the same tools and technology as we do in modern times. My first ever attempt at an Anglo-Saxon pot was a complete, massless disaster. The next two pieces I made (this included a pot and the bowl) were better, but it still was nowhere near the level of many of these Anglo-Saxon ceramic works. There were so many factors to consider: clay dryness, workspace temperature, the amount of clay used, checking wall thickness wasn’t thin enough to tear or thick enough to explode when fired, etc. It is easy to look down on “crudely-made” objects and attribute it to the lack of aestheticism, skill, and intelligence in a culture, but once one takes time to sit down and try to recreate the object, one will realize that perhaps they’re the ones who are lacking in aestheticism, skill, and intelligence.

 

ORP: West Stow Spindle Whorl

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This spindle whorl (one of many found not only at this particular site, but also in Anglo-Saxon England on the whole) is made from clay and was found at an unspecified location on the West Stow archaeological site. It would have been hand-made, and used along with a spindle (basically a short, smooth, stick) to spin wool into yarn, which could then have been woven into textiles. The spindle whorl was placed at the end of the stick, which tapered to keep the whorl from sliding off, and helped to keep the spindle spinning and twisting the wool into yarn. Today, spindle whorls are generally attached to their spindles, but in Early Medieval England this would not have been the case, allowing the user to trade out spindle whorls when convenient. They might have done this to adjust the weight — spindle whorls were often made from lighter materials like glass or heaver ones like lead as well as clay, and as the yarn ball around the spindle grew larger the added weight could cause the yarn to break — or simply to replace a broken whorl without needing to find a new spindle.

In reconstructing this spindle whorl, I went through two separate processes. First, I attempted to model it using PhotoScan, a 3-D modelling software. Unfortunately, the low light in the photographs I used and the dark color of the spindle whorl combined to make the second half of the whorl difficult to model, and I ended up with a strange cloud of blobs where solid spindle whorl was supposed to be. As I felt like my process hadn’t really taught me anything about the spindle whorl or how it was made, I decided to make a physical model using PlayDoh and attempt to spin some wool with it to get a feel for how weighty it might have been, and how that would have affected the spinning process. I first did a considerable amount of YouTube research on how spinning with a drop spindle actually worked (this video, as well as this blog), then put my PlayDoh spindle whorl on a pen and attempted to spin some wool. I learned mainly that spinning is a very finicky process, but also that the weight of the spindle whorl correlated to how long and how well my makeshift spindle would spin. Larger, heavier iterations of my spindle whorl were more likely to make the wool break off, but less likely to spin my wool too tightly and make it kink up. Overall, being able to adjust my spindle whorl was definitely worthwhile, and I can see why the Anglo-Saxons would have wanted different spindle whorls to use. I also realized how much easier it was to spin my spindle when the whorl was when it was even, and not larger on one side than the other. The West Stow spindle whorl was slightly lopsided, as I learned from my Photogrammetry recreation, so it would have spun at a bit of an odd rate, sort of like my PlayDoh spindle whorl (though not nearly as off-kilter).

 

In the end, my efforts left me with some very uneven yarn (a side effect of my inexpert handling of the wool) and a passable digital model of a spindle whorl in 180 degrees, if not 360 (see the above screenshot). Intangibly, though, I gained a rudimentary sense of how it might have felt to spin, or at least how it might have felt to learn to spin, the way the Anglo-Saxons would have, and the role a spindle whorl would have played in that.

Bibliography

Kania, Katrin. (2018). Medieval Spindles – Hints on Spinning and Weaving [web log comment]. Retrieved from https://www.pallia.net/en/main-page/articles/medieval-spindles.

“Dress and Identity.” In The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, edited by Helena Hamerow, David A. Hinton, and Sally Crawford. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

“Weaving and weaving implements.” In East Anglian Archaeology Report No. 24, edited by Stanley West. Suffolk: St Edmund House, 1985.