![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
People keep asking me about what I'm doing (researching local ancient pottery, making a tiny net, etc) and the actual answer requires quite a run-up.
Things that have come together in the last few months include:
*hand-building pottery (a thing I've been doing off and on for some time now, with the decision that wheel requires a level of specific skill-building I wasn't really interested in putting the effort into when I can muck about happily with more ergonomic clay nonsense and buy lovely things from people who have nurtured that skillset)
*two years of helping with the reproduction 14th century English kiln at pennsic, with this year featuring both an enthusiastic digger of clay out of the streambed so that we had lots of local clay in raw form and my sudden obsession with Neolithic grape pots which it turns out are *easier to make* when you're using sandy riverbank clay rather than finely processed commercial clay. (I came back to the studio & looked at the one I made before I left & realized I had created the Most Punk Grape Pot Evarr...)
*the several bags of subsoil that the people who built our deck dug out of the post holes & have been living under said deck since I refused to let them carry it all off to the dump. Full of quartz of all sizes, but also quite nicely claylike and workable when I screen out the pebble-sized bits
*my vague intention to make it to consult the Joan Cass Beck collection regarding books the library won't let me interlibrary loan because technically they have them already
*the slow accumulation of ancient string technology, now as wildcrafted cordage (the milkweed in my back yard is slowly being gathered up and turned into string, and I have finally found someone who will tell me how to get a full length of nice clean fiber out of it, even if I did have to watch several wildcrafter guy videos from people who just left the bark on to find the good one
...and probably five or six other things that seem obvious to me but most people don't know.
In any case, I think I have finally arrived at a definable area of interest, that being pre-wheel pottery forms. There's lots out there-- publications, people like Potted History (see the grape pot link) doing reproductions, well-labeled museum collections-- from Neolitic & Bronze Age Europe, but as I live here, I also wanted to know about what people used to do with *this* clay. And the answer is, mostly fairly big storage pots of which we don't really have a lot of good examples (tho I still need to go back & search the Smithsonian collections again with actual ware-type names in hand) because while there were lots of cool & elaborate things going on the other side of the mountains from here (not to mention the cool stuff you've probably even seen before in the Southwest) the mid-Atlantic is kind of a hole in usefully published research. Maryland has a lovely round-up of ware types on their diagnostic artifacts site which is probably quite useful for identifying sherds in the field and not particularly helpful for trying to make reproductions.
I haven't got a great deal to show for it yet-- most of my clay tests so far are in little hand-sized forms from the other side of the ocean (presumably around here they were using wood or gourds or bark containers for cups? Still not sure on that either) but I feel like I need to start drawing skill trees of "things you need to know to make Mockley ware"-- finding usable clay, processing it, but then you need shell temper which involves making crushed shells which you had to collect (& presumably ate for dinner), and you need a paddle & an anvil stone to shape it with and a net to keep the paddle from sticking (or so it is surmised...) which means you have to be able to *make* a net, which also involves making string to make the net from, and once you've finished making the pot and dried it for a nice long time you also have to pit fire it, which is another skill and equipment set.
And of course, the various Woodland-era people around here already *had* nets and shells and fire and suchlike, but my string is all machine-spun and I'm getting shells from a friend at a museum that gets donations they can't use & don't want to dump somewhere and confuse future scientists about what lived where, and so on. I need to get over my random dislike of wordpress so I can cross-reference my explanations.
notes: grape pots are so cool! Little hand-sized spiky things, we don't actually know what they were for, but the best guess is a way to carry coals without burning yourself, which means they're also effectively neolithic hand-warmers. (also, don't believe the Potted History making video-- you don't need to make all those little bobbles as cones before sticking them on. Just make a whole bunch of little balls around the same size, wet down the side of the pot, & smush them on. The smushing process does the pointy bit for you. Magic!)
Shell temper-- modern firing people will tell you to avoid anything with calcium in your clay, because above about 900 degrees C it undergoes a chemical change where it absorbs water when it cools, and this does not go well for the inside of a pot wall. But according to research done with modern potters who do bonfire and other "primitive" firings, in rapid low-fire conditions even if the clay gets up to that temperature, it doesn't stay there long enough to cause the change, hence shell and fossil limestone tempers in various early technology contexts. (I think this may also apply to salt, but would have to double-check.)
eta-- I also have plans to make it to a primitive tech festival next weekend & a Native American festival the weekend after, which might help track down anyone else who has been working on this longer; it doesn't help that both northern Anne Arundel county & out where the annex is are in what was a hunting-camp-only buffer zone between territories when europe turned up & started stomping on everything, so we don't have a direct ancestral land affiliation. The Piscataway Conoy are just south of us tho, & hosting the festival I'm hoping to make it to (on *cough* the day after my child has an "all night bowling" girl scout event, while grauwulf is off at an SCA thing, so er... we'll see how that goes.)
Things that have come together in the last few months include:
*hand-building pottery (a thing I've been doing off and on for some time now, with the decision that wheel requires a level of specific skill-building I wasn't really interested in putting the effort into when I can muck about happily with more ergonomic clay nonsense and buy lovely things from people who have nurtured that skillset)
*two years of helping with the reproduction 14th century English kiln at pennsic, with this year featuring both an enthusiastic digger of clay out of the streambed so that we had lots of local clay in raw form and my sudden obsession with Neolithic grape pots which it turns out are *easier to make* when you're using sandy riverbank clay rather than finely processed commercial clay. (I came back to the studio & looked at the one I made before I left & realized I had created the Most Punk Grape Pot Evarr...)
*the several bags of subsoil that the people who built our deck dug out of the post holes & have been living under said deck since I refused to let them carry it all off to the dump. Full of quartz of all sizes, but also quite nicely claylike and workable when I screen out the pebble-sized bits
*my vague intention to make it to consult the Joan Cass Beck collection regarding books the library won't let me interlibrary loan because technically they have them already
*the slow accumulation of ancient string technology, now as wildcrafted cordage (the milkweed in my back yard is slowly being gathered up and turned into string, and I have finally found someone who will tell me how to get a full length of nice clean fiber out of it, even if I did have to watch several wildcrafter guy videos from people who just left the bark on to find the good one
...and probably five or six other things that seem obvious to me but most people don't know.
In any case, I think I have finally arrived at a definable area of interest, that being pre-wheel pottery forms. There's lots out there-- publications, people like Potted History (see the grape pot link) doing reproductions, well-labeled museum collections-- from Neolitic & Bronze Age Europe, but as I live here, I also wanted to know about what people used to do with *this* clay. And the answer is, mostly fairly big storage pots of which we don't really have a lot of good examples (tho I still need to go back & search the Smithsonian collections again with actual ware-type names in hand) because while there were lots of cool & elaborate things going on the other side of the mountains from here (not to mention the cool stuff you've probably even seen before in the Southwest) the mid-Atlantic is kind of a hole in usefully published research. Maryland has a lovely round-up of ware types on their diagnostic artifacts site which is probably quite useful for identifying sherds in the field and not particularly helpful for trying to make reproductions.
I haven't got a great deal to show for it yet-- most of my clay tests so far are in little hand-sized forms from the other side of the ocean (presumably around here they were using wood or gourds or bark containers for cups? Still not sure on that either) but I feel like I need to start drawing skill trees of "things you need to know to make Mockley ware"-- finding usable clay, processing it, but then you need shell temper which involves making crushed shells which you had to collect (& presumably ate for dinner), and you need a paddle & an anvil stone to shape it with and a net to keep the paddle from sticking (or so it is surmised...) which means you have to be able to *make* a net, which also involves making string to make the net from, and once you've finished making the pot and dried it for a nice long time you also have to pit fire it, which is another skill and equipment set.
And of course, the various Woodland-era people around here already *had* nets and shells and fire and suchlike, but my string is all machine-spun and I'm getting shells from a friend at a museum that gets donations they can't use & don't want to dump somewhere and confuse future scientists about what lived where, and so on. I need to get over my random dislike of wordpress so I can cross-reference my explanations.
notes: grape pots are so cool! Little hand-sized spiky things, we don't actually know what they were for, but the best guess is a way to carry coals without burning yourself, which means they're also effectively neolithic hand-warmers. (also, don't believe the Potted History making video-- you don't need to make all those little bobbles as cones before sticking them on. Just make a whole bunch of little balls around the same size, wet down the side of the pot, & smush them on. The smushing process does the pointy bit for you. Magic!)
Shell temper-- modern firing people will tell you to avoid anything with calcium in your clay, because above about 900 degrees C it undergoes a chemical change where it absorbs water when it cools, and this does not go well for the inside of a pot wall. But according to research done with modern potters who do bonfire and other "primitive" firings, in rapid low-fire conditions even if the clay gets up to that temperature, it doesn't stay there long enough to cause the change, hence shell and fossil limestone tempers in various early technology contexts. (I think this may also apply to salt, but would have to double-check.)
eta-- I also have plans to make it to a primitive tech festival next weekend & a Native American festival the weekend after, which might help track down anyone else who has been working on this longer; it doesn't help that both northern Anne Arundel county & out where the annex is are in what was a hunting-camp-only buffer zone between territories when europe turned up & started stomping on everything, so we don't have a direct ancestral land affiliation. The Piscataway Conoy are just south of us tho, & hosting the festival I'm hoping to make it to (on *cough* the day after my child has an "all night bowling" girl scout event, while grauwulf is off at an SCA thing, so er... we'll see how that goes.)