Experiential Archaeology: A Night of Making Pottery

I had no idea what I was doing. I looked at this hard mass of clay, moved it around a bit on the table and in my hands, but nothing. Ideas came and ideas certainly went. The only thing I knew to do was get stuck in.

This piece is less about making a clay jug, and more about the limitations and struggles I encountered while making it. For those who are new to archaeology, this sort of activity is not about perfect reconstructions of past objects, but about how the small moments – such as labouring to make a clay pot in your room – can challenge assumptions that past pottery production was easy or quick. This piece explores the process of how simple pottery takes shape through negotiating with your physical limits, environmental conditions, and the medium itself.

This was by no means a controlled, measured, or accurate reconstructive process. I was not a white-coat in the lab, but a student in my cold room, at night, figuring out what it’s like working with clay. Furthermore, my methods were imperfect and in no way reflect conditions of how pottery was made archaeologically. But these imperfections, and my overall experience, didn’t aim not to recreate the past but engage in a process of making something with bare minimum tools.

Without sounding too Processualist [1] here, my working with clay verged on the adaptive but can be described more accurately as improvisation. It was working with a material that I had limited experience with and had to learn from, in situ. In most cases, when I went to progress – from finishing the base, making the body, the neck or the handle – something would go wrong, basically telling me: “no, you’re wrong”. It never had the words to say this, but nonetheless it spoke.

I had two tools in the whole process: my exceptionally dull kitchen knife and a bowl of water. However, the clay had been sitting on my windowsill for a week, exposed to the warm sun. There was nothing ‘clay’ about this thing other than my idea of it, this thing was basically rock. I started by dunking the whole sphere of hard clay, working the surface and setting the base, continually submerging, working, and so on.

I was rubbing, scrubbing,and dunking this spherical mass at 5pm on a Thursday. I had to apply a significant amount of pressure to just make any sort of shape emerge. Ultimately, what I had to do was completely destroy this thing, reach its core, and make it anew.

I got my kitchen knife but looked at it with dismay: do I hack, saw, or shave? I decided to work the clay with the knife, initially I was dicing, but when that failed, I moved on to a shaving motion, similar to the way you peel potatoes with a knife. Taking off thin layers which I could soak and smooth. This was all right but not ideal. The time was now 5:30pm.

I decided to work the thing more and created two opposing indents in the ball. Just like splitting an apple with both hands, and with Herculean effort, I broke the thing in half. Now we have a semi-sphere from which I can break off the edges. So I grabbed my knife the way characters in famous horror films do, making a fist around the handle with the tip pointing away from me. Hacking proved a good solution, it was controlled and precise; crumbs cascaded like an avalanche with gradually larger chunks beginning to crumble.

This was all very well. I was breaking down the hard clay, but I was just getting smaller chunks of hard clay, and despite soaking them, the project wasn’t going at the rate I wanted. So far my tool has had three functions: dicing, peeling and hacking. If I need malleable clay then I need to break down the solid lumps into something uniform, soft. So, I started bashing the clay with the blunt end of the handle. I doused it with water, BASH, water, BASH, and so on, forming something similar to what we call clay. It worked! I had found a solution to make hard thing soft. I repeated this process and didn’t finish till 7pm.

A lot of it required me to be hyper-observant of my senses. Among the surface I had to feel for any inconsistent roughness or solidness in the material. If there was any, then it required more water and more bashing. The small pieces of clay had to be pliable before anything else.

The clay, at this point, was working me, rather than me working it.

So, now I have my malleable clay, what else could I encounter? I’d love to say it all went swimmingly, but while some have beginners-luck, I did not. There were multiple factors at play: it was cold in my room, I had very limited experience with clay, and it was getting late. These pressures were important and amounted to a degree of improvisation.

I had found that the clay would turn ‘off’. It felt like the cold was sucking all the malleability out of the chunks; they’d turned solid and unusable. So I worked hard at one at a time. The base came first and was relatively simple, but it would require reworking and care while making the body due to hardening quickly from the cold.

The body was made using the classic method of segmented coiling. Roll out the clay to form a long string and wrap it around into a ring– that's layer 1. However, it was cold and very dry (and I'm convinced a shoddy piece of clay at this point too!) and each time I would get to the wrapping phase, the string of clay would break. I could see the pressure points. What would break first, second, third and so on – a symphony of frustration. This meant I had to really soak the working clay and act fast.

What finally worked was something rather peculiar. My first layer of the body was not uniform, it had different heights. In making my second layer, it turned out this would form part of my third layer and I’d have to pinch to fill the gaps in between (figure 1). Through a lack of skill, it all came together.

This ended up happening throughout the entire process. I had problems. When rolling out the clay it would break, or had too much air in, as there would be an open hole right through the centre of my roll. It felt like going one step forward and two steps back, but finding out I’ve somehow managed to reach a destination. It was 10:30 pm.

The neck was coiled the same as the body. And as I didn't have much clay left, I rolled small rings and started to smooth the body to form the neck. A height was achieved and a mouth was made. The handle was formed by an extended piece of rolled out clay and attached to the head and base of the body.

It was 11:38pm and clay residue covered my desk, but I was finished. I had made a thing, and done it in the most peculiar way, but what I experienced was the labour behind making a simple pot. 

This kind of experiential archaeology doesn’t recreate the past by any means, but it does change how you interpret everyday pottery. The pot I made remains misshaped and cracked, straight lines are skewed and finger prints pattern the surface. These marks are traces of effort and continual reworking. In this experience, pots and potsherds are repositioned from lifeless objects to products of ongoing and messy work.

Toby Mansell is a Masters student in Archaeology and Heritage in the School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities.

References

[1] Proeccesualist, or New Archaeology, developed in the 1960s-1970s and sought to approach archaeology using ‘scientific techniques’, claiming generalisations about the evolution of cultural practices. A line which famously summarises culture as an “extrasomatic means of adaptation” (Binford). Such approaches are riddled with problems and biases but unfortunately will not be covered here.

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