Pottery Sherd, Luce Sands

A thick pottery sherd found at Luce Bay. This rim section has a fine composition with black matrix and pink surfaces and prominent ridge decoration.   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 people 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.