The greatest rhetorical set piece in the English language was written about some early medieval pottery. Sat as I have been the past few months in the kind embrace of an archaeology department , I have had much cause to reflect upon this fact. The enthusiasm of the early medieval archaeologist for pottery can be a little bewildering. Many historians, I suspect, will have had the experience of attending a lecture in which a parade of apparently identical pots or jumbled fragments are displayed, the significance of which is — to judge from the reaction of everyone else in the room — clearly enormous yet fundamentally obscure to you.
Yet even the least materially inclined textual historian needs a working familiarity with the changing forms, manufacture and distribution of ceramics if they are to have any hope of making sense of the period they study.
Pottery survives. Not always intact, but a shard or a sherd can often tell as full a story as the entire piece. It does not decay like wood or textile or leather. It cannot be melted down and reused like metal or glass. And with it we can reconstruct worlds. We can use it to tell what people had to eat or drink, and how they prepared it. We can guess at the prosperity of a household with it.
We can track the patterns of commerce with pottery. We can understand how a society manufactures the goods it needs through pottery and how it makes art.
Given a decent typology we can even date a site with pottery. The most famous lines of the whole work come at the apotheosis of Book Five:. But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equall lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature.
