More examples of the ‘complex and endlessly varied’ pottery from the Ness

Post-excavation work on the Ness’ huge pottery assemblage continues apace with our ceramics specialists, Roy and Jan, working their way through thousands of finds bags.

It’s fair to say they are still finding some remarkable examples of prehistoric pottery.

Roy opened a small bag of unassuming sherds from Trench J last week. After carefully brushing away the caked-on midden he revealed some delicately decorated examples of Neolithic pottery, impressed with a round-ended tool to create dimples, accompanied by lines and shallow, short slashes.

There was a piece of the pot’s rim and the complete vessel must have been a very pretty thing. But even incomplete still worthy of admiration. 

Meanwhile, on the other end of the scale, Jan opened a large bag from Structure Twelve that was found to contain fragments of three (or perhaps four) separate vessels!

The broken parts of the vessels ended up intermixed and Jan has now separated the pieces out to give several conjoining pieces of one thick, large pot with remarkable, heavily incised decoration.

There are some pieces from another thick, heavy pot, with rounded cordons applied as its decoration, and a third, a much thinner, lighter pot but again with incised linear decoration. 

Where we can tell, one of the pots has a straight-sided, flowerpot shape, while another has had rounded sides. 

The three definite ceramic vessels represented in Jan’s Structure Twelve bag. (📷 Anne Mitchell)

Each bag we open is part of the ongoing ceramics cataloguing process and each one, no matter how dull, how small, how crumbly the contents seem to be, tells us more about the complex and endlessly varied pottery once used at the Ness.