Made in Hembury
As a ceramicist and an experimental archaeologist, I became fascinated by the story of the Hembury bowl some years ago. It is on permanent exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. The bowl is 6000 years old(36950BC), was made of gabbro clay from the Lizard, Cornwall and was found at Hembury Causewayed enclosure, in East Devon.
The early Neolithic in Britain is characterised by the introduction of ceramics, polished axes, farming practices and built architecture of which the causewayed enclosures are only one type. The identification of early Neolithic gabbro clay ceramics in the 1960s established new knowledge of extensive trading and exchange of prestigious objects in the Neolithic as the same type of pottery as the Hembury bowl was found as far afield as Windmill Hill in Wiltshire.
I was approached by Carrel Jevons, the owner of Hembury Hillfort, in early 2019 if I wouldn’t mind being filmed digging out gabbro clay. What followed was a full experimental reconstruction of early Neolithic gabbro ceramics, conference presentations of the work and subsequent publication in Marking Places which is a collection of papers presented at the Neolithic Studies Group conference November 2019. As well as my experimental archaeology of gabbro clay, the papers cover recent excavations of causewayed enclosures, Simon Davies study of the Tor Enclosures of the Southwest, community projects and 2 articles on Hembury causewayed enclosure. Causewayed enclosures represent the earliest known examples of the enclosure of open space and were built and/or excavated monuments, made up of earthen banks and interrupted ditches, usually circular-ish in shape where seasonal communal gatherings took place. The aim of books such as this, is to push the research forward as archaeological knowledge is often partial and always being modified. It is heavily influenced by the monumental work of Gathering Time by Alistair Whittle et al 2011 where radiocarbon dates were recalibrated in a new statistical framework called Bayseian recalibration. This produced a new precision never before achieved in radiocarbon dating and corrected the dates back about 1000 years thus lengthening the Neolithic.
For further information on the Neolithic, on Causewayed enclosures, the videos of the experimental archaeology to date on gabbro clay and making Hembury bowls, and the link for Marking Places please click on these links
https://www.oxbowbooks.com/oxbow/marking-place.html
Chris Chapman film for www.hemburyfort.co.uk