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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 May 2014
It is a commonplace that of all the mobile art-forms of prehistoric times pottery is the least mobile and the most domestic. It would be wrong to assert categorically that never before the Roman period or the years immediately preceding it was pottery the subject of trade and transport; but the traffic was at least on a limited scale. Unlike objects of metal, therefore, which may wander far from their place of origin in the course of trade or other movement, pottery closely reflects in its distribution the relationship between culture and geography.
Pot-making, too, is a comparatively lowly, if an expressive, craft. In a wealthy community, or in a community with varying levels of wealth, pottery takes second place to metal or (where it exists) glass: usually, therefore, pottery is the borrower both of form and of ornament. And while with an inventive people the result may in due course be something new and significant in itself, in less fortunate circumstances—as for instance under the mass-production methods of Roman times—the potter's debt becomes a lifeless imitation of, or a negative development from, the forms and motifs of the superior materials.
page 160 note 1 Bulleid, and Gray, St. George, The Glastonbury Lake Village, II, 486–7Google Scholar.
page 163 note 1 The numbers relate to the catalogues of pottery in the monumental reports on Glastonbury (above) and Meare (Vol. I, 1948) by Bulleid and St. George Gray (hereafter referred to as Glastonbury and Meare) the prefix-letter P being omitted.
page 163 note 2 Llyn Cerrig, 54–5.
page 163 note 3 Glastonbury, II, 511Google Scholar.
page 164 note 1 Early Celtic Art, I, 60Google Scholar.
page 167 note 1 Cf. the famous urn from Plouhinec, Finistère: du Chatellier, La Poterie aux époques préhistorique et Gauloise en Armorique, Pl. 14, 3, and Fig. 12 below.
page 167 note 2 cf. Meare 167, 116, etc.
page 167 note 3 The ‘running’ triquetra is apparently represented by Glastonbury 196; Glastonbury 301 is even more fragmentary but looks like part of a single triquetra.
page 168 note 1 British Museum, E.I.A. Guide, Fig. 174.
page 168 note 2 Cf. also the ends of the scrolls on the Crosby Ravensworth spoon: Fig. 6.
page 169 note 1 Fox, , Llyn Cerrig, 49Google Scholar and Fig. 25.
page 170 note 1 Antiquity, V, 489Google Scholar.
page 170 note 2 Proc. Prehist. Soc., 1938, 152 ff.Google Scholar
page 171 note 1 These statements call for some qualification in the case of the Sussex pottery which exhibits several styles, in addition to that which is found around the Thames estuary. As Professor Hawkes has noted (Sussex Arch. Colls., 1939, p. 283Google Scholar), the style of some of this ornament closely resembles that of Hunsbury; and his Fig. 4a, 7, for instance should be compared with that on the dish from the Marne (exact find-spot not known) figured by Jacobsthal, (Early Celtic Art, IIGoogle Scholar, Pl. 211, no. 412)
page 171 note 2 Aspects of Archaeology, 159 ff.
page 171 note 3 The Desborough bowl is illustrated photographically in Aspects of Archaeology, Pl. VI, A.
page 173 note 1 As, for instance, on Meare 249; though the rendering is not perhaps as mechanical on the original pot as it appears to be on the drawing.
page 173 note 2 B.M. Iron Age Guide, Fig. 183.
page 173 note 3 V.C.H. Oxon., I, Pl. XI, e.
page 173 note 4 Wheeler, Maiden Castle, Fig. 71, 163.
page 174 note 1 Arch. Camb., 1948, 44Google Scholar.
page 174 note 2 Aspects of Archaeology, 163 ff.
page 175 note 1 But see footnote, p. 171.
page 174 note 2 Maiden Castle, 216 ff.
page 174 note 3 Revue archéologique, II (1901), 51Google Scholar.
page 174 note 4 Williams, Arch. Camb.,
