Tag: West Stow

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

ORP: Double-Sided Comb

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About Object 1402

A double-sided bone comb found at the West Stow Settlement.

Object 1402 was described in the archeological records as a “double-sided bone comb in very fine condition.” The comb was found during the archeological excavations at the West Stow settlement that were undertaken by the British Department of the Environment beginning in 1965. During the excavation process, the department uncovered the remains of around 75 buildings and thousands of artifacts that served to add greatly to the known material culture of these people. The comb was found in Sunken Feature Building 51 (SFB 51), one of the most northern structures present at West Stow. This small building, about thirteen feet by seven feet, had a pit dug into the ground (it was estimated to have originally been about two feet deep) over which the building was situated. SFB 51 had two central support posts, as was fairly typical of the other buildings found on site, with straight walls and rounded corners. Interestingly, despite the comb being considered one of the better examples found at West Stow, there was very little else discovered in this building, only a single hook, and a few broken pieces of pottery. The small size of the building and the artifacts that were found suggest that SFB 51 was originally a domestic area that probably housed relatively few people, as would be expected in a single-family settlement.

 

Combs in Anglo-Saxon England

Bone and antler combs are by no means rare finds in excavations of Anglo-Saxon settlements, and at West Stow, they were one of the most commonly uncovered items. These included single- sided, double-sided, and triangular combs that were found scattered throughout many of the roughly 75 buildings uncovered on the site. While it is clear that these items were prevalent throughout England during this time, it remains uncertain of their cultural significance as they do not appear in textual sources from the era. Object 1402, for instance, though it is an unusually good specimen, but it still leaves many questions about its uses and those of many combs found throughout Britain. Were the broken teeth the result of the last 1,500 years underground, or were they teeth that snapped off before it was discarded? Who would have used it? Were combs primarily used by women, or would they have been seen as ungendered during the period? What does this comb tell us about the values of the Anglo-Saxons, does the level of detail put into the comb suggest vanity or merely a concern for hygiene?  Many of these questions will never be answered, and certainly will not be will not be derived from a single artifact, but if observing an object will not bring us to understand the lives of the people who owned it centuries ago, attempting to recreate its production and use will at least serve to bring us closer to the headspace of those who produced these objects and interacted with them years ago.

 

Recreation Process

I attempted to make a 3D model of the comb using the process of photogrammetry. Much of the process did involve mind-numbing struggles with the computer program or merely setting the computer system to run while I sat and read a book, but I also found that some of the process did give me a greater insight into the original making process. Through the process I had the ability to look at the object from many angles greatly improved my understanding of how the comb was put together, and allowed me to view the sides of the comb in much greater detail than I would have seen in a side-view photograph of so thin an object.

Top of the comb during the photogrammetry process.

Bottom of comb during the photogrammetry process.

In addition to this, I believe that part of the photogrammetry process gave me a taste of the actual process of cutting the teeth of the comb. I spent many hours laboriously cutting away the excess material that the computer had produced from the background, carefully shaving it away from the teeth of the comb.

Cutting excess material away from the teeth of the comb.

This long and intricate process (one that would have been made infinitely harder in the Anglo-Saxon period by the absence of an undo button) gave me an appreciation for the delicacy of the work. A bone worker would almost certainly have failed many times before he was able to create a comb so intricate with nearly uniform teeth. It would assuredly have been an arduous and often frustrating process, which led me to wonder, how these combs could have been so common throughout the West Stow settlement.

 

Insight Gained

While a digital recreation of the comb found at West Stow did not necessarily shed great insight into the physical process of bone carving during the early medieval period, it did add give a greater appreciation for the time and energy that would have gone in to such a creation and the delicacy of much of the work involved. I discovered this in the process of cutting the excess material from the model, as described above but also through time spent examining the object and trying to place it within its larger context. This is one of the benefits of the field of digital humanities and the possibilities it presents for the wider exploration of history. It certainly should not replace physical models or other forms of recreation, but as an added tool, it offers the chance to produce a greater number of models of items and helps us to integrate interdisciplinary fields to better our understanding of archeological sights such as West Stow. Through the process of photogrammetry, I was able to take pictures of an item on the other side of the Atlantic and produce a physical, printed model that gives us a good idea of the original. It may not be an exact replica, but I have a much better idea of the complexity involved in the original object, and it can now be seen by a wider audience.

A 3-D reproduction of the West Stow comb.

As is often the case, the greater understanding of the piece does not necessarily offer a greater simplicity to its historical narrative, but it does serve to enrich it and to give a more wholistic view of its place in history. Perhaps the recreation and reclamation of ancient objects and crafting techniques will not serve to answer all our outstanding historical questions, but it will, without a doubt serve to enrich our historical understanding. It is a journey of self-discovery that may vastly complicate our ideas, but it will also, overtime, allow for a greater exploration of Anglo-Saxon Britain through personal experience and immersion in many different avenues of historical exploration.

 

Further Reading

Ingold, Tim. Making. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Leahy, Kevin. Anglo-Saxon Crafts. Brimscombe Port Stroud, UK: The History Press, 2003.

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

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.