Second example of stamped decoration found on pottery sherd
By Sarah Carter
Post excavation work at the Ness of Brodgar continues and a few weeks ago something exciting happened. I was gently cleaning a small fragment of pottery with a soft brush. It was barely 3cm by 1.5cm in size, but I featured some unusual decoration. The pattern was familiar. I had seen this before.
Rewind to the last weeks of the 2024 excavation, to an extraordinary afternoon in the finds hut. You see, on an excavation the diggers are generally only familiar with the area they are working on. The finds team, however, knows a little about the whole site and sees all the wonderful (and less wonderful) finds as they come in.
It was a Thursday, towards the end of the season and from about 2pm the most amazing finds began to come in, one after another, from all parts of the site – polished stone tools, stones with incised decoration and a beautiful piece of pottery with particularly unusual decoration.
It had two small indented circles which contained a raised cross, most likely made with a stamp. This stamped decoration is precise and clear, the fabric of the pottery is solid and it is well-fired, not crumbly and full of crushed rock temper like much of the pottery at the Ness. It was a stand-out piece.
And the tiny sherd that I was cleaning so carefully a few weeks ago revealed the same stamped decoration!
Records show that it was excavated from the same area of the site, within the deposits laid down before the construction of Structure One. These deposits were of rammed midden that was brought to the area to cover the remains of the earlier Structure Forty to provide a flat surface on which to build One.
It might be from the same vessel but, unfortunately, the two pieces don’t actually join. There may, of course, be more of them in finds bags we have not yet opened and on pottery we’ve yet to clean. But the really interesting thing is that this is not decoration we usually find on Neolithic pottery and we can find no parallels for it in either the Grooved Ware nor the wider Neolithic repertoire. But now we have two of them.
There are so many questions about what these pieces of pottery are telling us.
Why do we not find more stamped decoration elsewhere? What was the stamp made of? How was it made to create such a precise decorative motif?
Yet again the Ness of Brodgar surprises.
