Introduction

Pottery tends to arouse strong emotions in archaeologists: they either love it or hate it. For some it has an indefinable fascination, and is potentially full of information, which has to be teased out by careful and painstaking study. At the other end of the scale, it is seen as the most common of archaeological materials, whose main functions are to slow down the real business of digging, fill up stores, and behave as an archaeological black hole for post-excavation resources. Between these extremes there is a whole spectrum of opinion: some, for example, see pottery as an unavoidable chore, a material to be processed as quickly as possible before being reburied (either in the ground or in a store), rather like low-level nuclear waste. A sign on a laboratory door that read ‘Danger: pottery processing’ satirised this view. Others take a more mystical view, believing the humblest sherd to be full of the most amazing information – ‘Show them a piece of worn pottery and it's the rim of a centurion's favourite cup’ (read in a local newspaper) – which only the pottery specialist, as some sort of guru, can unlock.

There is an element of truth and an element of caricature in each of these descriptions. While it will be clear where our feelings lie, our aim in this book is to take a balanced view of the potential contribution of pottery studies to archaeology, neither too optimistic nor too pessimistic. To do this, we first need to look at the history of our subject, on the grounds, familiar to archaeologists, that to understand the present we first need to study the past. It is natural for archaeologists to attempt to divide their material into chronological phases; the history of archaeology in general, and of ceramic studies in particular, is no exception. Shepard (1956, 3) saw three phases, but she did not try to put dates to them: the study of whole vessels as culture-objects, the study of sherds as dating evidence for stratigraphic sequences and the study of pottery technology as a way of relating more closely to the potter. Matson (1984, 30) applied two of Willey and Sabloff's (1974) phases – the Classificatory-Historical Period (1914–60) and the Explanatory Period (1960 onwards) – to American ceramic studies. Van der Leeuw (1984, 710–18) saw three phases: the typological (up to 1965); the ‘three levels of research’ (1965–80), continuing the previous tradition, with a ‘micro’ level below it and a ‘macro’ level above it; and the ‘study of the cultural element’ (1980 onwards).