Ness of Brodgar - Coloured Pottery

Researchers: Nick Card & Roy Towers. Research Area: Ness of Brodgar

Coloured Pottery from Neolithic Orkney: the full story now available.

Each month we aim to bring you a snapshot of research carried out at The University of the Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute. This month we talk to Roy Towers who has recently written a paper with Ness of Brodgar Site Director, Nick Card on coloured pottery from Neolithic Orkney.

Roy writes......"Grooved Ware pottery is remarkable stuff. From a probable beginning in Orkney it spread rapidly across almost all of what is now Britain and Ireland during the later Neolithic period.

Excavation at the Ness of Brodgar site on Orkney has unearthed around 80,000 sherds of Grooved Ware and, with an assemblage as vast as this, there were always bound to be surprises.

Just how surprising is now becoming clear, with ground-breaking research revealing that Grooved Ware pottery is the latest material resource from the Neolithic to show that the period was much more colourful than anybody expected.

The story begins during the 2011 season at the Ness when a few of the sherds emerging were suspected of having coloured decoration. The colours discovered were red, black and white and this fitted neatly with similar colours which had already been noted on some of the stone walls of the large buildings present on site.

More of the coloured pottery continued to emerge, also showing that the colours had been used in specific ways on differently decorated pots.

Ness site director Nick Card and ceramics specialist Roy Towers realised that these discoveries were of huge importance and a collaboration was formed with Dr Richard Jones of the University of Glasgow and Dr Nic Odling of the University of Edinburgh to further investigate the coloured vessels.

The first task was to identify the nature of the materials which had produced the different colours. The red colour was quickly identified as haematite, a mineral available on the island of Hoy and also on the Orkney mainland. The black turned out to be carbon, or soot.

The white colouring was more difficult. It was suspected to be a bone ash of some sort, especially as initial analysis showed traces of apatite which is a component of bone.

Further analyses by different methods failed to readily confirm this diagnosis, and the matter was further complicated by the presence in the white colouring of silicate minerals which had no business being present in anything composed of bone.

More samples of coloured pottery were discovered and lengthy scientific analyses continued, conducted by Dr Jones who is a veteran of archaeological investigations in Orkney. The team were spurred on by the recognition that coloured pottery is known from several areas in Britain and Europe in the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, although the Orkney material is clearly amongst the earliest ever found.

The problem of the white colouring is now solved. The burial conditions at the Ness had restricted the amount of apatite found on the samples and the silicate minerals are most likely the result of grinding down burnt bone with stone mortars and pestles to make the colouring paste."

The extraordinary story of Orkney’s coloured Neolithic pot has now been published by the prestigious international ‘Journal of Archaeological Science’ and the full paper can be accessed free until December 28 at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X19303219?dgcid=coauthor