Why does pottery become scarce during the Saxon/Anglian period...

[Marc Berger]

Ah, but if it hadn't samian spindle-whorls wouldn't be so interesting

basically what we are seeing is deforestation the roman roads are loggers roadways. Even Samian had to be made in Gaul because the Romans had run out of wood in Italy. And they had pretty much hit peak wood by hadrians time and scraping the barrel by the Constantine Christian take over when they desert the western empire which was once forests but now an open park land full of migrating hoards. The Saxons couldn't have made a pot if they had wanted to. They are basicaly burning brush, peat, dung and sods and looking for places where they can get the miserable stuff dry enough to get any warmth and industry out of it... A midden. Obviously by Stamford ware times the wood had grown back a bit but it didn't last. What might be funny is did Hadrian build the wall to protect Scotland as a source of wood?

[Dinosaur]

Now there's a thought! :face-approve:

Only slight drawback is that there's plenty of Anglian pot around here

...and plenty of timber buildings...

[Mike.T.]

I thought Britain was heavily wooded until the time of Henry VIII who decimated the woods for timbers to build his ships.

Not only pot but coins / metalwork are rare in the Saxon period too, in comparison to the Roman and Medieval periods. The Romans were masters of mass production as well as importing vast quantities of items into Britain, which didn't happen on the same scale in the Saxon era, perhaps it is not so surprising that Saxon sites seem so barren finds wise when you consider the 400 yr period before it.

[Marc Berger]

Only slight drawback is that there's plenty of Anglian pot around here ...and plenty of timber buildings

Only if you call a finger and thumbed coarse lump of clay semi fired in a bonefire a pot, I think that the Romans might quibble. As for the timber buildings more like a few per parish and the parish system basically the solution that the Saxons had to living in a "Parkland" which is all they had to imagine a forest by-just enough large standard trees to make a hall so long as they all could bare to live in it, if not it was a hole in the ground covered with thatch -the same stuff they were firing their pot with (although I am not sure how much living was ever done in SFB. Ridge and furrow may also have been a solution to sharing out the resources of living in a parkland/parish. By the time of the Normans sentimentality (and establishing a prior authority) for the time before saxons resulted in creating the nova foresta which is probably what the saxons imagined the land scape like before they built their hamlets. Which is hardly an example of an optimum climatic forest although I don't imagine that's what the Romans found either. The Romans did though probably find far higher wood density (the local had just about descovered wheel thrown pot presumably fired using locally high density climatic optimum forest) to indulge their every whim which is basically grey wares centred near Peterborough an area returned to in the post med when the self firing feton brick became popular in London which I have wondered whether the nene colour coated wares relied on same the low calorific firing properties of the clay.
What the Romans left the Saxons basically was not enough to fire regionally centred pottery types looking for continental markets which wasn't too bad for the Saxons because they had basically been trained to survive the frisian islands and that required a communal midden. Respect the poo hitting cadastral social engineering..

[Marc Berger]

I thought Britain was heavily wooded until the time of Henry VIII who decimated the woods for timbers to build his ships.

this was heavily wooded Britain that had its own probably more important magna carter
http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/forests/Carta.htm
the woodlands seem to have been created out of an all mans no mans land principle post Norman top down with the rulers claiming ultimate right in times of need over designated areas. Most of medieval accounts though show payments for major construction timbers made sourced from individual estates/parishes the woodlands of which are less well defined.

This though is wood for construction rather than wood for firing roman military multinational civil engineering tile brick pot and keeping the underfloor heating on tickle over fed by the local Saxon slave who had an alternative choice trying to fathom lion feeding as a spectator sport for the first time.

[Dinosaur]

All the 'primary' woodland around here got cleared around 500-400BC and stayed chopped down, so much the same as now throughout mid/later IA, RB, Saxon, Med and PM - but there still seems to have been plenty of wood available for building stuff, ironworking etc

'Forest' doesn't mean trees per se (bit like 'waste') in DB and other medieval sources, so can't be used as direct evidence of woodland

[Dinosaur]

All the 'primary' woodland around here got cleared around 500-400BC and stayed chopped down, so much the same as now throughout mid/later IA, RB, Saxon, Med and PM - but there still seems to have been plenty of wood available for building stuff, ironworking etc

'Forest' doesn't mean trees per se (bit like 'waste') in DB and other medieval sources, so can't be used as direct evidence of woodland

[Marc Berger]

All the 'primary' woodland around here got cleared around 500-400BC and stayed chopped down

Which is hardly an example of an optimum climatic forest although I don't imagine that's what the Romans found either.

but what the romans did is burn "any" wood for pot and brick and winter heating and general fast food cooking and presumably not manage wood that should have been conserved for construction...... basically they are the equivalent of fossil fuel burners and the Saxons are the exponents of what might be renewable resources. Its all very James lovelock Gaia end of the cretaceous, the forams and ostracods poisoned their own atmosphere by halving the co2 concentrations greenhouse gas concentrations which allowed their oxygen loving slaves the mammals to come to the fore on a landscape created by dinosaurs and then fuller with oxygen.

What cleared the wood cerca 500-400BC ?

[Dinosaur]

At a guess, Iron Age farmers? Certainly someone then got heavily into making fields, building roundhouses all over the place, growing cereals and doing stuff with pasture straight after...could have been aliens I suppose...

[P Prentice]

placenames show there was plenty of woodland in the 7thC which mmust have been there in the 6th and still in the 8th but in the west there was still no pot and no buildings - why not?