Grooved
Ware in Britain and Ireland (Neolithic Studies Group Seminar Papers 3)
by ROSAMUND CLEAL AND ANN MACSWEEN (Editors)
Oxbow Books. 1999. 206 pages, 71 line drawings,
2 photographs, 10 tables. ISBN 1 900188 77 5.
This collection of fourteen papers (plus Introduction and Gazetteer)
arose from a Neolithic Studies Group seminar that took place on a memorably
eventful and frosty day in February 1994. As one of the speakers and
subsequent contributors to the volume, my comments are those of an active
participant in the demi-monde of Grooved Ware studies, and they are
offered with the benefit of hindsight. It is with affection to the Editors,
and in admiration of their achievement, that these remarks are addressed.
As Sara Champion commented,
in her review of the seminar for PAST in December 1994, only 19 finds
of Grooved Ware were known of when Stuart Piggott first defined this
pottery as a widespread late Neolithic ceramic tradition in 1936. By
1954, when he expanded the concept to define a 'Rinyo-Clacton Culture',
encompassing house styles, types of ceremonial site and bone artefacts
as well as pottery in his Neolithic Cultures of the British Isles,
the number had risen to 47; and when Wainwright and Longworth presented
their reassessment of Isobel Smith’s Grooved Ware ‘styles’
in 'The Rinyo-Clacton Culture Reconsidered' in 1971 (Wainwright &
Longworth 1971), it had reached 116. Over the next 23 years this total
would virtually triple to 345, with major assemblages emerging from
the Orkney Islands, the distribution expanding to encompass hitherto
'blank' areas such as Wales and Ireland, and a good number of radiocarbon
determinations becoming available. By 1994 the time was therefore ripe
for a fresh re-evaluation. In her Introduction to the volume, Ros Cleal
explains that she and co-Editor Ann MacSween were drawn to the challenge
of organising such an exercise when they – like others before
them – realised that the assemblages on which they had been working,
from opposite ends of Britain in southern England and in Orkney respectively,
contained some striking similarities. The agenda which they set, for
both the seminar and the volume, was 'Grooved Ware: What, Where, When
and Why?'. In assessing how well the volume works in helping us to understand
this ceramic phenomenon and its broader context, these four questions
will be kept in mind.
The volume was long
in gestation - five years from the seminar to the publication - and
in the interim, the line-up of contributors changed. Papers by Julian
Thomas, on the contexts in which Grooved Ware is found, and by Andrew
Jones & Colin Richards, on ways of approaching the study of this
pottery, dropped out while six new contributions on a variety of topics
were added (by Edwards & Bradley; Gibson; Brassil & Gibson;
Simpson; Brindley and Garwood). Furthermore, Ian Longworth changed the
topic of his paper from a general review of developments in Grooved
Ware studies since 1971, to an examination of 'Grooved Ware' design
elements in the enigmatic chalk 'drums’ from Folkton in Yorkshire.
The published papers
are arranged in four sections, with two ('Regional Surveys' and the
curiously non-adjacent 'Grooved Ware from excavations') broadly covering
questions of 'what?' and 'where', a final section 'The dating of Grooved
Ware' dealing with 'when', and a brief (thirteen-page) section loosely
addressing the question of 'why?'. (This question is also touched upon
in several other papers.) Longworth & Cleal's Gazetteer at the end
of the book offers more 'where' information, and not only provides an
invaluable update on Wainwright & Longworth's 1971 version, but
also demonstrates the continuing inexorable rise in the number of Grooved
Ware discoveries, the total having reached 443, plus 34 ‘possibles’,
by the time of publication.
The regional surveys
comprise two from southern England (namely Alistair Barclay's on the
Upper Thames, and Michael Hamilton & Alasdair Whittle’s on
the Avebury area); one from Ireland, by Anna Brindley; one from Scotland,
by Trevor Cowie & Ann MacSween; and one covering Yorkshire and northern
England, by Terry Manby. (It would, perhaps, be churlish to point out
that Ireland and Scotland are somewhat larger than ‘regions’;
we will let that pass.) Further information on Scottish finds is offered
by Derek Simpson's contribution on Raigmore (Stoneyfield) and by the
current author's paper on the Links of Noltland assemblage in the section
on 'Excavations', while George Eogan & Helen Roche's piece on Grooved
Ware from the Boyne Valley enhances the picture for Ireland. Kenneth
Brassil & Alex Gibson's paper on material from Hendre in Flintshire
provides the sole contribution on Welsh Grooved Ware (other than Garwood's
comments on Welsh dates in Chapter15).
The 'Grooved Ware
in context' section comprises a brief note on the discovery of Grooved
Ware in the vicinity of rock carvings on Ilkley Moor by Gavin Edwards
& Richard Bradley, and a digest of information on the incidence
of Grooved Ware (and other pottery) at timber circles by Alex Gibson,
as well as the aforementioned excursus on the Folkton Drums by Ian Longworth.
The final 'Dating'
section consists of two intriguing papers, which offer different perspectives
on the chronological ordering of Grooved Ware. The first is an ambitious
attempt by Anna Brindley to present an overall sequence for the development
of the tradition in Britain and Ireland, using typochronology and radiocarbon
dating. The second is a meticulous study, by Paul Garwood, of the same
kinds of information as they pertain to southern England. The key difference
(apart from geographical scope) is that Garwood’s is situated
within, and addresses problems springing from, the Longworth stylistic
scheme of ‘Clacton/Durrington Walls/Woodlands/[Rinyo]’,
whereas Brindley eschews this in favour of six chronological horizons.
We shall return to the relevance (or otherwise) of Longworth’s
classificatory scheme later.
Without doubt, the
volume is a 'must-have' for anyone interested in late Neolithic Britain
and Ireland. It offers a wealth of information that is concise and well-presented,
with numerous, mostly excellent-quality illustrations. It provides us
with the first substantive review of Irish Grooved Ware, and a digest
of most of the radiocarbon dating evidence from Ireland and Britain
that was available at the time of publication, along with a useful discussion
of the potential and limitations of using C14 dates for this period
of prehistory, given the vagaries of this part of the calibration curve.
It also goes into the question of design similarities with passage tomb
art (e.g. Barclay, p.19; Brindley, 135-6), and of links with other media
(e.g. Longworth’s chapter 9; cf. Kinnes 1995 on the spiral motif,
and Bradley 1993, 63-6) – although there is doubtless more that
can be said on these topics. Regarding interpretation of the Grooved
Ware 'phenomenon', Garwood's contribution is particularly praiseworthy
for its level-headed critique of models based on simplistic, courte
durée dualisms between cultural orders represented by Peterborough
vs. Grooved Ware, or Grooved Ware vs. Beaker use. Furthermore, the Gazetteer
- compiled with the help of numerous contributors - represents the fruits
of a considerable amount of labour. For all of this, the Editors and
contributors are to be congratulated. But to what extent does the volume
help us to understand Grooved Ware, either as a ceramic tradition or
as part of broader late Neolithic developments?
As Cleal concedes
in the Introduction, the volume does not set out to be a compendium
of all that was known about Grooved Ware in the late 1990s: for example,
“there is little within these pages on the use and function of
Grooved Ware and the likely possible contribution of residue analysis
to this..”(p.7) While it is clear that the volume could not have
aspired to include an illustrated corpus of all known Grooved
Ware (the massive – and mostly unpublished – Orcadian assemblages
rendering this virtually impossible), it is nevertheless a shame that
there is no overview of the Welsh finds, and that certain key assemblages
(such as those from Upper Ninepence in Wales (Gibson 1999), or Barnhouse
in Orkney, where one pot from Structure 8 was found set into the floor)
are not covered, or are mentioned but not illustrated. In this respect,
the absence of Jones & Richards’ seminar paper, which used
Barnhouse as its exemplar, is particularly regrettable. Given the undoubtedly
justifiable claims for stylistic variability at site, local, regional
and national levels, it would have been useful to see more illustrative
evidence of this.
Similarly, as regards
radiocarbon dating, it would have been useful to have seen a complete
list of all the relevant radiocarbon dates for Grooved Ware in Britain
and Ireland, and to have had a critical evaluation of all of them, not
just those from Ireland and southern Britain. Indeed, Patrick Ashmore
had provided just such a review for the Scottish data in Gibson &
Simpson’s Festschrift for Aubrey Burl in 1998 (Ashmore
1998) – answering Garwood's plea (p.146) – but it would
have been helpful at least to summarise it for this volume. One casualty
of the delay in publishing is that some papers were several years old
when the book was printed, and there may have been an understandable
reluctance to effect substantial revisions as new information became
available.
Returning to the subject
of vessel function, it is a shame that it was not possible, in the end,
to cover the very exciting results of the organic residue analysis of
the Upper Ninepence assemblage (Dudd & Evershed 1999) – work
which subsequently went on to identify a clear associative contrast
between Grooved Ware and pig consumption on the one hand, and Peterborough
Ware and cattle consumption on the other, in certain southern British
assemblages (Dudd et al. 1999). This work has continued in
Bristol University with Anna Mukherjee’s current doctoral research
on residues in Grooved Ware and other pottery, and the results are awaited
with great interest. Furthermore, Merryn Dineley's intriguing suggestion
(reported in British Archaeology 27, 1997, 'News') that some
large Grooved Ware tubs may have been used for brewing ale is worthy
of serious consideration, albeit hard to prove.
More serious, perhaps,
is the assumption that readers all know, and agree, what Grooved Ware
actually is and how it is defined. A degree of prior knowledge –
particularly of Longworth's four styles – is required of the reader,
and it is a shame that his review of the concept of Grooved Ware and
the history of its study that had been delivered at the seminar was
not published, as this would have helped to set the scene. The question
of how Grooved Ware is defined, and whether it constitutes a ‘tradition’
(however that may be defined), is not a straightforward matter, and
more could have been made of this point. One of the most trenchant criticisms
of Grooved Ware studies, as voiced for example in David Clarke's review
of this volume for the Antiquaries Journal, has been the elasticity
of its definition. It would seem that any pottery assumed to be of late
third or second millennium date that did not readily fit within the
categories of Peterborough Ware (or its northern and western congeners)
or Beaker has been placed in the voluminous conceptual tub that is Grooved
Ware. The pitfalls of this approach have recently been highlighted by
Alex Gibson's compelling re-evaluation of some claimed examples of atypical
regional material from the Milfield Basin as Bronze Age ceramics (Gibson
2002). With this in mind, the temptation to view the plain 'flat-rimmed'
ware from some Perthshire ceremonial sites as possible Grooved Ware
(Cowie & MacSween, p.54), rather than as Late Bronze Age pottery
(as an increasing number of radiocarbon dates for Aberdeenshire finds
has been demonstrating), needs to be treated with caution, in this reviewer's
opinion (pace G. Barclay 2000).
The validity of Longworth's
four Grooved Ware 'styles' is touched on, and its shortcomings in describing
material from Scotland and Ireland acknowledged (which is just as well,
since one pot from Skara Brae contains elements of three of these styles:
Clarke pers. comm.). However, among southern-based scholars, at least,
these convenient conceptual divisions have become deeply rooted, and
indeed Garwood's paper suggests that there may be some degree of stylistic
succession over the estimated 1000 years of this pottery's use in southern
Britain c 3000-2000 BC, with the Woodlands style generally post-dating
the Clacton, and both in use concurrently with the Durrington Walls
style. Not one of the papers advocates a rigorous back-to-source critique
of these basic categories, however. Nor is it suggested that these style
groupings might actually be straitjacketing our way of thinking about
ceramic design and its meaning: pigeonholing pots into a defined style
is not tantamount to explaining them. This reviewer concurs with Brindley's
and Garwood's position that what we need, to understand patterns and
changes in this broad ceramic tradition, is a firm chronological framework,
"drawing on rigorous analyses of relative dating evidence to lend
detail to absolute chronologies based on the critical evaluation of
radiocarbon dates" (Garwood, p.162). Whether that is actually achievable,
given the limitations of calibration, is debatable; but there is certainly
room for improvement. The intriguing claims made by Brindley, in trying
to establish this kind of scheme, deserve rigorous testing based on
firmer chronological foundations.
A further area of
weakness in the volume concerns the 'Why' aspects of Grooved Ware studies.
There is a disappointing paucity of debate on: i) how, where, when and
why Grooved Ware emerged, and ii) how and why strikingly similar pots
came to be made in widely-separated parts of Britain and Ireland –
and whether this betokened a brief phase of long-distance contacts,
or a more sustained period of idea-sharing between networked communities.
To this reviewer these are the most interesting questions; and the difficulty
of answering them should not be a bar to vigorous debate. The degree
to which the hypothetical southward spread of Grooved Ware use from
Orkney is associated with the spread of practices relating to henges
and circles of timber and stone is indeed a vexed and complex question,
and other entire volumes have been dedicated to such issues. While not
for a minute advocating an 'ex Orkney lux' model for the emergence
and spread of these ceremonial structures, this reviewer believes that
there is nevertheless a compelling pattern of associations, one aspect
of which was highlighted in Alex Gibson's brief paper on timber circles
(and in particular in his comments on cosmology). Within Scotland, it
does not seem coincidental that there is a distributional correspondence
between the thin scatter of Grooved Ware down the Atlantic seaboard,
and the thin scatter of timber circles and of stone circles marked by
unusually tall stones (at Callanish and Machrie Moor), echoing those
at Stenness. To this reviewer, a plausible way to explain this is in
terms of maritime contact with communities in Orkney, and a decision
to embrace practices relating to a cosmology in which the celebration
of significant celestial events featured large. There are good precedents
for Northern:Western Isles links, as seen in the earlier shared use
of Unstan bowls. And taking the argument further, the similarity between
the pot from Knowth passage tomb 6 in the Boyne Valley in Ireland and
some Orcadian Grooved Ware (see Brindley's Illustrations 3.2 and 3.3)
should not occasion surprise, given the other clear evidence for long-distance
links between these two areas around the time when Maes Howe-type passage
tombs were being built (Sheridan 1986; in press). How the adoption of
this novel ceramic style in Ireland fitted in with the social and ideological
transformations of that time is one of the most intriguing questions
to be sorted out; and similar issues remain to be faced in explaining
the spread of this ceramic tradition (and whatever practices and beliefs
may have accompanied it) elsewhere. The ghastly spectre of Euan MacKie's
astronomer-priest missionaries (1997) should not deter others from pursuing
the cosmological aspects.
Finally, a niggle.
The distribution map accompanying the Gazetteer on p.178 is a classic
demonstration of the archaeological map-maker's problem. Time is short;
you can't find a map that shows both Britain and Ireland together, at
a reasonable scale; what do you do? Here, it is all too obvious that
Ireland has been drawn in by hand. Even worse, the dots on it do not
correspond to those on George Eogan and Helen Roche's more reliable
and accurate map of Irish Grooved Ware on page 110! The solution, readers,
is to substitute the latter on the overall map, so that your lecture
slides – should you opt to breach copyright shamelessly –
will show a better picture!
Despite these criticisms,
Cleal and MacSween have succeeded in producing a genuine milestone in
Grooved Ware studies, which will be used by all serious Neolithic scholars
for many years to come. Even if the volume has indeed confirmed our
view that "we still 'know paradoxically so much and yet understand
so little'" about Grooved Ware and its users (p.7), nevertheless
it poses a research agenda and a meaningful challenge, which is for
us to pursue. Others are already busy on such matters, for on the Web
it is indeed possible to find mention of 'Grooved Ware people'…
Dr Alison Sheridan,
Archaeology Department,
National Museums of Scotland
Review Submitted: August 2003
References.
Ashmore, P J 1998. Radiocarbon dates for settlements, tombs and ceremonial
sites with Grooved Ware in Scotland, in A Gibson & D D A Simpson
(eds.), Prehistoric Ritual and Religion, 139-47. Thrupp: Sutton.
Barclay, G J 2000. Croft Moraig reconsidered, Tayside & Fife
Arch J 6, 1-7.
Bradley, R J 1993. Altering the Earth. Edinburgh: Society of
Antiquaries of Scotland (Monograph Series 8).
Dudd, S N & Evershed, R P 1999. The organic residue analysis of
the Neolithic pottery from Upper Ninepence, in A Gibson, The Walton
Basin Project: Excavation and Survey in a Prehistoric Landscape 1993-7,
112-20. York: Council for British Archaeology (Res Report 118).
Dudd, S N, Evershed, R P & Gibson, A M 1999. Evidence for varying
patterns of exploitation of animal products in different prehistoric
pottery traditions based on lipids preserved in surface and absorbed
residues, J Archaeol Sci 26, 1473-82.
Gibson, A 1999 The Walton Basin Project: Excavation and Survey in
a Prehistoric Landscape 1993-7. York: Council for British Archaeology
(Res Report 118).
Gibson, A 2002 Museum notes, 2002. 1. A matter of pegs and labels: a
review of some of the prehistoric pottery from the Milfield Basin, Arch
Aeliana 30, 175-80.
Kinnes, I 1995. An Innovation backed by Great prestige: the instance
of the spiral and twenty centuries of stony sleep, in I Kinnes &
G Varndell (eds), ‘Unbaked Urns of Rudely Shape’: Essays
on British and Irish Pottery for Ian Longworth, 49-53. Oxford:
Oxbow, Monograph 55.
MacKie, E 1997. Maeshowe and the winter solstice: ceremonial aspects
of the Orkney Grooved Ware culture, Antiquity 71, 338-59.
Sheridan, J A 1986. Megaliths and megalomania: an account, and interpretation,
of the development of passage tombs in Ireland, J Irish Arch
3, 17-30.
Sheridan, J A in press. Neolithic connections along and across the Irish
sea, in V Cummings & C Fowler (eds.), The Neolithic of the Irish
Sea: Materiality and Traditions of Practice. Oxford: Oxbow.
Wainwright, G J & Longworth, I H 1971. The Rinyo-Clacton Culture
reconsidered', in G J Wainwright with I H Longworth, Durrington
Walls: Excavations 1966-1968, 235-306. London: Soc Antiq London
(Res Rep No. 29)
The views expressed in this review are not
necessarily those of the Society or the Reviews Editor.
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