Pottery rim sherd, Luce Sands

A large rim sherd from a Neolithic bowl.  The original pot would have had a baggy shape with a round bottom.  These simple pots were hand-built from local clays and fired in bonfire kilns.   This is one of hundreds of prehistoric pottery fragments collected from Luce Sands.  Most of these discoveries have been made as sand dunes shifted in winter storms to reveal previously buried prehistoric land surfaces.   Whilst people depended on hunting and food gathering for survival storage containers were made of light portable materials such as skin bags or baskets of vegetable fibres. Pottery emerge when people began to lead a more static existence and agricultural changes meant that large durable containers for storing grain were required. The craft of making pottery arrived with the families who crossed the North Sea and the Channel to settle here.   Neolithic potters built up their pots in spiral coils of clay. The surface was scraped smooth and sometimes burnished with a pebble before firing. Pots were usually round bottomed and their shapes and decorations were often reminiscent of their leather, wood or basketry predecessors. Until recently there was no evidence that these prople wore textiles. However, in 1967 a piece of neolithic pottery was found at Luce Bay in Wigtownshire which bore a clear impression of a piece of woollen cloth the earliest so far in Britain.