Neolithic Impressed and Related Wares in Britain and Ireland

This article is from Current Archaeology issue 433

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This volume comprises 11 regional or national papers and a synthesis of lipid analysis results. Several contributors note that Impressed Wares have been a ‘Cinderella’ among Neolithic pottery traditions. They echo Isobel Smith’s 1974 characterisation of Peterborough Ware (the Impressed Ware tradition in England and Wales, traditionally comprising Ebbsfleet, Mortlake, and Fengate Wares) as showing ‘a gradual loss of cultural status’ in the sense of rare association with other distinctive artefacts and rare occurrence in primary contexts other than pits. But much has changed in the last 50-odd years, with commercial archaeology vastly expanding finds of Impressed Ware. This, and increasingly accurate dating, places the tradition in the later 4th to earliest 3rd millennium BC, marked by changes in other artefacts, monumentality, and settlement character.

The contributors include thinkers and listers, and the dividing line is sometimes a fine one: the magisterial Frances Lynch shapes a mass of Welsh detail into an effective narrative; some other papers are relentlessly site-by-site, almost sherd-by-sherd. Themes emerge, however. Locations are mainly low-lying, often riverine. Contexts are inconspicuous, dominated by pits (except for Ebbsfleet Ware), old land surfaces, pre-existing monuments, and stray finds – a combination interpreted more than once as reflecting extensive, short-stay settlement. ‘Special’ deposits seem rarer than in adjacent periods. Exceptions are pit deposits in the South-west, noted by Andy Jones and Henrietta Quinnell; and reinterpretation by Rosamund Cleal and Joshua Pollard of the burials and heaps of Peterborough Ware in West Kennet Long Barrow as a possible middle Neolithic reuse of the distal chamber. Impressed Wares were adopted unevenly. Other traditions prevailed in Scilly, the Isle of Man, Scotland north of the Great Glen, Orkney, and the Western Isles. Alison Sheridan emphasises that in Ireland pots paralleling British forms were rare in diverse later 4th millennium BC traditions. Lipid analyses show continuation of the early Neolithic dominance of dairy foods, followed by ruminant meat, with very little pork.

The book is essential for anyone engaging with Impressed Wares and/or the middle Neolithic, raising many questions for future research.

REVIEW BY FRANCES HEALY

Neolithic Impressed and Related Wares in Britain and Ireland
Alistair Barclay and Alex Gibson (eds)
Oxbow, £45
ISBN 979-8888572221