MAKERS STORIES: POTTED HISTORY
Ancient Pots, Experimental Archaeology and the Family Business that uses a Heritage Craft Thousands of Years Old.
We turned up to the beautiful Northumberland studio of Potted History with bags full of our fieldwalking finds.
Potted History are a family business, father and daughter team and talented potters whose mission it is to keep history and archaeology alive through the creation of museum quality replicas that are available to all. Between themselves they possess an incredible wealth of knowledge that as makers allows them to understand and interpret ancient pottery to get a true understanding of the ancient potter who made them.
They produce vessels that embody the original ancient pots they are working to recreate, but this often means Graham and Sarah have to create entire toolkits like the ancient potters before them to enable them to produce pots and vessels that bear the same marks and techniques as the originals. But their pots don’t just look like the original, every pot they make is authentic to the core, even their grit has to get the authenticity seal of approval, and they even say that if you are unlucky enough to break one of their creations then it will even break like the original. They often work with private individuals, museums such as The British Museum, The Ashmolean, The Vindolanda Roman Fort, and production teams like The Detectorist Christmas Special (anyone remember the Holy Grail … ) all alongside stocking an online store (and yes you can buy your very own Holy Grail from there).
Inside the studio, tucked away onto every shelf is an ancient pot sherd or Potted History creation that represents such a rich wealth of history and archaeology that you can’t help but be enveloped by it all. A bucket over there of prehistoric tools, a roman mortarium here that Graham uses to grind material down, roman potters wheels stacked up in the corner, and the new addition to this makerspace. Our Roman Found jars, bags and boxes of pot sherds that we have been obsessively harvesting from years of fieldwalking over our permission. Expertly guided by the knowledge and expertise of Graham and Sarah we are ready to dive deep into the hands and the makers of the ancient potters who made them.
But first it’s time to get to know Graham and Sarah and discover all about the impressive business and craft that is Potted History.
It's interesting isn't it because of the course of the years we've produced some amazing replicas for museums and heritage organisations around the world but somehow being asked to make this piece for the detectorists program was very very special.
Roman Found: Thank you both for inviting us to the studio today?
Potted History (Graham and Sarah) : No problem! It’s been wonderful showing you around!
RF: So to start with, would you like to explain a little bit about what potted history is and what it represents?
PH G: Well, Potted History has grown out of the fact that I've been a working potter all my working life and I've always been fascinated by the sort of idea of ancient technology coming to play in what I did. So what we do now is we create replicas of very ancient pots, going right back to the earliest. We try and replicate the technology as far as possible, all about everything from the methods and materials through hand tools through to to reconstructing potter's wheels and building kilns and firing pots in the way they would have been fired originally. So it's sort of a combination of experimental archaeology and replication I suppose would be a summary of what we do.
RF: You actually produced the Holy Grail for the Detectorist special. What was it like working on such a piece that has become iconic in TV history?
PH G: It's interesting isn't it because over the course of the years we've produced some amazing replicas for museums and heritage organisations around the world but somehow being asked to make this piece for the detectorists program was very very special. Apart from anything I've always been a fan of Mackenzie Crook's work, particularly the detectorists. So when I got the phone call, and they sort of explained what they wanted, the immediate reaction was, wow, yeah, that's brilliant. Although they didn't tell you it was the grail, they told you the general theme of what they wanted.
PH S: and you worked it out from there!
PH G: Yeah. They were trying to be sneaky, they sort of said they wanted a small cup, fairly plain pottery, dated from about 30 AD, could have been made in Palestine, in what they described as the Herodian period, and I thought, oh, I think I know what we're looking at here.
RF: You often mention having a handshake with ancient potters through your work. What is normally revealed to you through their work?
PH G: Well I think both Sarah and I, both get a buzz from handling pieces in museum collections and things. And quite often what happens is you're holding a piece in your hands and you can sort of feel your hand or your fingers sit into the place where a potter's fingers sat maybe as long ago as 5,000, 6,000 years ago. And that's a very special feeling, but it's also about the fact that as you start to look at the pieces and as you start to try and replicate them, there are what what is sort of described as eureka moments where you suddenly go ah right I get it now I understand exactly what's going on there and and just you know it it's sort of this it is like a conversation between uh ourselves and and the ancient potters a bit how did you? oh right! okay!
PH S: It's kind of fun also the idea that, that they press their finger into that clay about you know, four thousand two thousand, whatever, thousand years ago it was. That moment is still there, that moment is forever saved in time. I find that fascinating.
PH G: It is moments in time, I refer to it as frozen moments in time. Actually, its fired moments in time that's what it is.
RF: Part of your mission is all about producing museum quality replicas that are easily accessible to the general public. How important do you think this is?
PH G: I've spent a lot of time working, demonstrating in museums and heritage sites around the country and I'm well aware that what the general public do is they walk in and they walk straight past all the broken pots, straight to the bling, the gold and the jewels and things like that. But for me, the gold and the jewels are the story of the wealthy, the story of the kings, queens, lords, all that sort of thing. And the pottery is the story of us, it's the story of ordinary people and in it is recorded all sorts of information. So I've sort of made it my mission, if you like, over the years to stop bits of broken pottery being boring. They're not, they're exciting, they tell stories. And I think that's what is important to us, that when we create a pot, we're not just trying to make it look like the original thing, we're trying to make it feel like it, we're trying to give some sort of understanding of how it might have been used, how it was created and in some cases how it was broken, how it decomposed. So all of these things are possible by creating these replicas that allow members of the public to handle them and to talk about them. I think Sarah feels the same.
PH S: Yeah, I think it's difficult for a person to get enthusiastic about something that they're not allowed to touch. And I think with golden jewels, people have that acceptance because you know, they're such high value objects. But if you can't touch some of the everyday stuff, it just doesn't, I don't see how you're going to get that connection with it. And obviously we don't want people rummaging through actual pieces of pottery that are thousands of years old. So it's a way of creating that door for people to kind of access these objects and really understand how they're used through cooking and using them as they were intended, which is also very fun.
PH G: So is eating the food.
PH S: Yes, so is eating the food, although I must admit to not being that historically accurate there, but I'll cook something delicious in it, it might not be historically accurate.
Its fired moments in time that's what it is.
RF: What has it been like learning and recreating the ancient craft and tools of historic potters?
PH G: Well, I said when I was a student, I was sort of well aware that what I was doing was working in a craft that went back thousands of years. And I was interested at that time to sort of know more about the ancient techniques and how I could bring them to bear into contemporary practice. So it's always been a thing of mine to try and explore the ancient technology, the ancient techniques. And of course, a lot of them are more direct I suppose than what we might use today. In other words you're using your hands and you're using very basic tools often of natural materials to do the work that these days is often done by a tool that was made by somebody else or a machine that'll do the job for you. It feels more in contact with the material. I was sort of brought up into pottery at a time when honesty to materials was a big thing and I think that's important.
PH S: Yeah, I think it creates a more honest replica if you're using the actual tools. So yeah, it just kind of feels right. It's about getting it accurate, isn't it? And authentic. Because otherwise you don't get the right feel for the object and without the right feel you're not learning what we need to learn about how they were used.
RF: Do you have a particular favourite era of ‘potted history’?
PH G: I always say the Bronze Age is my favourite time period but often it's the Romans that pay the bills. So we do make a lot of Roman pottery and we sell a lot of Roman pottery but personally I love making Bronze Age pieces particularly beakers and food vessels that sort of thing but being entirely hand formed no potter's wheel, no moulds or anything like that. They are very time consuming and possibly not the most economically viable business wise, but certainly the most enjoyable to explore. And of course I work, well we both work a lot with archaeologists and archaeological sites where new things have been discovered and to start to replicate something that's only just come out of the ground, you know, first time anybody's seen it in sort of four or five thousand years, it's quite something special.
PH S: Yeah, the puzzle, it's, finding it and then figuring out how to make it, the puzzle is enjoyable.
RF: You often work for large institutions and production companies to produce replicas, what has been the job that you have learnt the most from?
PH G: Oh lordy!
PH S: Jomon?
PH G: I suppose Jomon, in a way, this was for English Heritage, their Circles of Stone exhibition down at Stonehenge, where they brought artefacts in from Japan, and they're sort of not exactly comparing but relating the sort of Japanese stone circle culture to British stone circle culture and in doing that they asked us if we would recreate some Jomon ceramic artefacts. In my case the flame pots and Sarah was making the Dogu figures. In both cases we both did learn a lot, there was a lot to find. And in fact the flame pot was something I'd sort of had on my to-do list ever since I was a student, and that's a long time ago. And I was waiting for somebody I suppose to give me a reason to do it, because it is possibly the most complex mind-bending pot that I've created throughout my entire career.
PH S: Yeah I think it was also quite nice because you know we do make a lot of objects from similar areas and all from Britain generally speaking. It was kind of nice to take a moment to appreciate all the histories, I suppose that you maybe get a bit of tunnel vision when you're always working boundaries and yeah, I like that.
RF: A lot of what you do you describe as ‘experimental archaeology’ . How important do you think this technique is to our understanding of the ancient world today?
PH G: Yeah, experimental archaeology has definitely become a big thing now and quite a few of the universities have started to put together experimental archaeology degree courses and beyond. And I think the reason for that is that in the past, and it's one of the things that got me started in what I do now, is that when I first started I was looking for that information about ancient techniques, ancient technologies, and I would go quite naturally to archaeological journals and excavation reports and that sort of thing. And what I often find is that the archaeologists themselves in the 1950s or whatever set about describing how things were made or how they were fired or, you know, all the tools that were used. And so often I find myself sitting reading this going, no, no, that's wrong.
So I would go off and I would try things out and I'd test my ideas and all of a sudden I discover that what I'm doing is experimental archaeology and I suppose when I first started doing it I didn't realise that's what I was doing. But what it does is it explains an awful lot not only about the pots themselves but often about the cultures that created those pots and other things that were going on around that. I think one of the things that you could cite, for instance, is the replica kiln that we've built at Vindolanda. Every time we fire that, we learn a little bit more, and we've learned a lot about how the Romans judged temperatures. They didn't have thermocouples, they didn't have electronic thermometers. We've learned a lot about the quantities of fuel used, because a lot of what had been written in archaeological journals before that was completely wrong.
We've learned a lot about the types of fuel, the way the kiln was packed, the structure of the kiln itself, how you close it off, the atmospheres that you can create within there. And all of this has come from actually doing it, and you know, you couldn't come on that information in any other way? No, and there's all the other bits, we now use some of the hot coals that we rake out of the kiln, we use them to cook with because it just seems like a logical use of the fuel. These coals are not required for the firing because you need the quick heat of fresh fuel, so you've got this kind of by-product which allows you to cook very nice food and the workers are going to have to eat. So it's all of this stuff, it's not just about the technology, it's also about the periphery, what might have been going on around, you know, how much time did they have to stand and gossip, etc, etc.
When you go back to look at the reports on the sites, quite a lot of the kilns that have been excavated, somewhere near the fire mouth of the kiln, will be a little hollow scooped out into the bank side that has never often really been explained, than now we think.
PH S:Yeah, because I was having a conversation with archaeologist when we were there and she said, oh there's this little bit and I didn't know what it was, I wondered if it could be the hearth and then she said oh, but having said that, it's a lot higher up than yours is and I said well if I could have mine a lot higher up, I'd have mine a lot higher up because it's bad for my back! Having to lean down and do this. So it's through that kind of conversation that we actually work out discoveries.
And I was waiting for somebody I suppose to give me a reason to do it, because it is possibly the most complex mind-bending pot that I've created throughout my entire career.
RF: So just how did you get into this particular area as your business, was there a particular passion that drew you in?
PH G: Was there a particular passion that drew you in? Well, I think I've sort of already talked about the direction I came to get into it. But the most sort of trigger points I suppose. When my wife Linda and I left college, we went to work at a pottery in the West South of Scotland with a chap called Joe Finch. He then had connections with a pottery in Lesotho in Southern Africa and we ended up out there running the pottery in Lesotho. And the thing being there was that there were people still in the villages creating and making pottery in the way that they would have done for thousands of years and it was fascinating to see that so at that point I got some to do I suppose my first direct research and then when we came back to the UK I will point out 20 years later, it took us a while! We set up in Northumberland and I started making a few sort of heritage pieces and things and got to know the archaeologists at the Northumberland National Park, Paul Frodsham and Rob Young and there was an excavation project going on in the Breenish Valley, Bronze Age work, and they asked it would be possible to make some replicas of that and at the same time on Hadrian's Wall we were asked if we could make some replica Roman lamps for some of the gift shops on Hadrian's Wall and really that was it, that it snowballed from there and that was in sort of 2001-2002 so ever since then it's pretty much been ancient pottery all the way.
PH S: Yep, long may it last!
RF: How important do you think ceramic remains are to understanding the ancient world?
PH G: I think ceramic artefacts, one of the most important things about them of course is they will survive in almost any ground conditions, certainly some of the earliest stuff like the Neolithic, and going back to before the Neolithic, it is quite poorly fired and it does succumb to frost and things like that. But on most archaeological sites the ceramics will survive, along with the stonework, when maybe metalwork or organic artefacts haven't, they’ve disappeared. So it's quite important in terms of it's often one of the only things we have left from some archaeological sites.
PH S: And its often used to date its a more accurate method of dating than some of the other objects, you know stone objects cant be dated.
PH G: Yeah in fact ceramics was used as a key to dating stuff before carbon dating came along, so it was one of the major ways of dating. We do have carbon dating now, but now also things like residual analysis and thermo luminescence testing where we can work out the last time that something was fired. There are all sorts of other techniques that come out of the pottery, so yeah there are a lot of things that can happen there. But also pottery types and pottery making methods and things help to connect up often quite distant sites so you can make links between trading sites and things using the pottery.
PH S: Yeah one of my favourite things, and I can’t quite remember the exact vessel, but there’s two vessels that were found in the UK, and they were Anglo Saxon, one of them was from a Pagan style burial practices and one of them was from a Christian style burial practices but a potter had made pots for the different burials. And I love that, I love that the potters are not saying oh no your Christian I’m not making for you or your Pagan I’m not making for you but the pots came from at least the same pottery family if not the same potter as they have identical stamps but are from two totally different burial practices.
RF: Well thank you for such an enlightening day here in the studio surrounded by all these incredible things, we both certainly feel like we have a better understanding of ‘Potted History’ now and its given us a better appreciation for every sherd that comes out of our fields!
PH: No problem at all! Thank you for making the trip and asking such interesting questions.
You can find Potted History on Instagram and on their Website :
