2nd January 2013, 03:37 PM
I’ve come to this debate a bit late, but as I’m a pot person, I thought I’d share a few of my views. The issue of standards slipping seems be constantly on the agenda in all walks of pottery studies in British Archaeology, which worries me. Don’t get me wrong, there are some awful pot reports out there, and though good guidelines are important to have in place, bad and boring reports are not just confined to the practitioners that don’t use or follow them. Doing your descriptions of fabrics, forms etc., and providing tables is all very well and ‘proper’, but it’s doesn’t necessarily make a good pot report. On the whole, I think a specialist body we’re pretty great at generating lots of quantified data on this attribute or that (though we like swabbing over the ‘best’ approach to doing it), but most of the time it isn’t really doing much, we’re just list making. Sometimes I think we’re far too concerned with these things and forget to try and say something interesting about pots and roles they played. Sad really, because this wasn’t always the way. In the middle decades of the twentieth century people pretty much wrote prehistory from the study of pot, and came up with some really interesting ideas from working with assemblages that aren’t half as good as we now deal with on a day to day basis. My frustration is that expectations are so low from the profession - most of the time all people want is a spot date and summary. Is it any wonder that standards are falling when the demands we make of pottery and pottery analysis are so limited?