The central standing stone pot – ‘another mighty jigsaw with no picture’

Joanne Greaves here again, exploring another wonderful Ness pot and learning a great deal more as I go along. I’m thrilled to be part of the Ness of Brodgar pottery team and hope you enjoy following what I’m doing.

A while back, at the end of our very exciting summer, some exceptional pieces of pot emerged from one of the storage boxes during the pottery triage programme – some of you may have seen some of what we found at the Ness of Brodgar open day at the 2026 Orkney Archaeology Festival.

Initially, we had a small find number 15030 (a number now etched in my brain), from context 3687, an area near the central standing stone, between Structures One and Twelve. The pot was almost complete and seemed to have been left there on purpose.

My imagination runs wild imagining what that all signified to the people who put it there.

Sf 15030 consisted of a large, bandaged mass (pictured above), extremely fragile, which came out of the site as an excavated whole of midden and pottery, then secured by its wrap-around bandage, and accompanied by some other bags, also of 15030, with marvellous decoration and chunks of rim, revealing fine decoration on the internal surface too.

At this stage, the design seemed quite simple compared with the last collection of sherds I worked on and I set off to draw this seemingly straightforward pottery vessel.

Anne and Nick had each taken a few weeks holiday an upon their return we took out all the sherds from SF15030 to try and jigsaw them together – which they conveniently “kind of” did.

Just one piece struck me as odd – a large sherd that looked freshly snapped with no midden attached nor “tumbled” edges. This was odd considering it was around 5,000 years old! I discussed this with Nick and he went off to do some further digging through the record.

He returned with what I’d describe as a wheelbarrow full of bags of small finds, containing many sherds, and a list of small finds numbers from context 3687 gathered over two years of excavation in 2012 and 2014.

With support from pot specialist Jan Blatchford (my mentor and guru for all ceramic-related subjects) we checked out all the (many, many) bags and sure enough they all appear to be the same vessel!

It had exceptional decoration – a large, chunky pot from the rim down with a thick slip with many incised lines which created the look of cordons. To me, it seemed to have decoration all the way down, which is an unusual characteristic for Neolithic pottery.

What seemed to be a pot with a straight, symmetrical design began to appear as something else – the “cordons” appear to be “wonky” or angled and one close to the rim definitely has different dimensions to another part of the pot.

It was beginning to look as though it was maybe not so straight and simple after all.

So, here we go again – another mighty jigsaw with no picture.

With Jan’s help and guidance, we have made a plan to track and record the stages of bringing together all of the many sherds, which will be done in the sketchbook and with sequential photographs. We also need to extract all the midden encased pieces and clean them to see how they fit together and to establish what the midden covers.

All of this pot is very fragile and wants to fall apart instantly. This is due to the massively tempered coils. Where possible we will be using Paraloid B72 reversible acetone-soluble adhesive to reconstruct bigger sherds and the consolidation of the surface slip, which is very thick.

This exciting work has begun back at Ness headquarters. When my excitement has abated and the metaphorical celebratory fireworks have stopped, we’ll be giving further updates

Wish me luck.