Grooved Ware pottery sherds from Structure Forty-Four

Structure Forty-Four pottery sherds.

Over 20 years of excavation at the Ness, we amassed a substantial collection of Neolithic pottery, more than a metric tonne in total. Most of this was the distinctive flat-bottomed, decorated Grooved Ware that characterises the period.

Pottery fragments of every size were recovered, and it is safe to say that hardly a day of digging passed without a sherd appearing somewhere on the site. This year, however, Trench W told a different story. Only a handful of small pottery fragments emerged from the area around Structure Forty-Four.

These have now been cleaned and examined by ceramics specialist Jan Blatchford. As the photographs show, some sherds were decorated with incised grooves and possible applied cordons and undoubtedly derived from Grooved Ware vessels, providing a date of at least 3200BC. This supports our current interpretation, based on the architecture, which places Structure Forty-Four at around 3100BC.