Tables, volcanoes, pots that (kind of) talk, and  making sense of artefactual variation
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-05-07

Rather provocatively, prehistoric pots do not divide themselves up into mutually exclusive categories awaiting discovery by the archaeologist. Indeed, it is highly likely that there would have been disagreement about how to classify such vessels at the time that they were being made and used. How, then, are we to approach the often intimidating complexity of prehistoric assemblages?
Is there essential order to be found? And just how useful is typology if it has to be imposed onto the data by contemporary archaeologists? This paper will propose that ceramic variation arises for many different and complex reasons and, as no such thing can exist, the search for the essential nature of a category must be a wild goose chase. It is argued that a more promising approach is to see artefactual categories as more-or-less coherent dynamic (that is, constantly changing) assemblages held together, to a greater or lesser degree, by specific practices and shared understandings. If so, then identifying the salient forces at work in such ‘territorialisation’ is a potentially productive way forward.
As an exemplar of such an approach, the paper will consider the role of semantic salience, or what we understand pots to be saying, as one principle constraining variation within a highly coherent type of vessel - the so-called Unstan bowl, found across northern Scotland and the Scottish Atlantic façade in the Early and Middle Neolithic.

Mike Copper, University of Bradford