5. Pottery and Axe Production

The appearance of polished axes at the beginning of the Neolithic need not, however, have required any pre-existing tradition of axe manufacture, for about the same time indigenous communities did learn how to manufacture another, entirely novel, artefact form: pottery. Moreover, the high quality of the products and similarity of the carinated form over large geographical areas may be instructive when related to the requirements of contemporary axe production. In particular, both these aspects of the earliest pottery suggest that it was produced by emulation as part of the process of acculturation and that access to the new exotic domesticates was matched by – if not required by – the production of new and appropriate artefacts (including axes).

In this context the fact that, despite the high quality and similarity of form, the pottery appears to have been produced by local communities (Sheridan 1991) may also be relevant to the nature of axe procurement and exchange, namely that control and production did not involve people walking into areas from great distances to obtain their own axe. Certainly no one suggests that the existence of gabbroic pottery in Wessex is the result of people there travelling to West Cornwall to get clay as part of some social requirement. However, the fact that gabbroic pottery was apparently exchanged over relatively large distances raises a number of questions. Is it coincidence that it was made in the same 'area' as Greenstone axes or could it be that the temper was recognised/thought to be the same 'stone' as the axes? If the latter, should we see pottery fabric and inclusions as providing for those objects ancestral geographies of the kind claimed for stone axes? Equally, was the movement of gabbroic pottery equivalent to that of the (Cornish) stone axes? If so, is it not possible that pottery produced 'locally' could be taken to centres such as causewayed enclosures for exchange and as part of the process of accessing and participating in the new package?

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