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

[Dinosaur]

No Saxons/Anglians there to make it? :face-stir:

[P Prentice]

plenty of c14 dates say otherwise

[Dinosaur]

Hope you don't have a holiday cottage thereabouts } Thought they were all dead keen on being the last vestige of the Western Roman Empire (until taken down by Edward I) and all that, no Saxons there!

[Mike.T.]

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...

Don't buy that the Iron Age population of Britain chopped all the trees down for cultivation when the population was either tiny or in many places completely non existent. Ditto the Saxon era.

[Tool]

Don't buy that the Iron Age population of Britain chopped all the trees down for cultivation when the population was either tiny or in many places completely non existent. Ditto the Saxon era.

Maybe this depends on your area, but 'round this part of the world I'm constantly surprised quite how dense the population was during the IA. I don't know about other parts of the country, but for this region at least I'm getting the impression that large swathes of the landscape were being occupied and managed.

[Dinosaur]

We've got wall-to-wall field-systems and you can't put in a trench without hitting another roundhouse, no reason to think there were any less people around than during the high med period, land could certainly support the population

[Marc Berger]

heres a nice little connect iron age romans deforestation marginal /not so areas type of paper http://www.archaeologyuk.org/cbanw/CBANW..._14-26.pdf The old round house ve rectangular house. The round being a bit more geodesic is possibly a bit more economical between volume of space and build materials required and heating distribution where as the rectangular was a bit more wasteful and had some serious weak cold spots notably the roof but you at least got to hang picture frames and set up stalls.

but we are contemplating hostys pot vacuum commencing of the fifth (I of the pot prolifera in the roman period school). Obviously an alternative to deforestation as a problem in the pot making department is to have tree taboos and refuse to use certain trees to spite ones nose. As Prentice has pointed out lots of tree names abound in the runic period, the very period of old english. The mighty ash and oak seem to be picked on. Maybe these Frizian Anglo-Saxons were a bit tree huggy which is a good thing and could have been the first proto attempts to mouth the forest charters of the 13th century. Cut Ash out of your life and maybe you struggle to light a fire in winter without seasoning it. Could that be enough to reduce pot kiln centres to their knees?

Have come across a pot called a "terp Tritzum" -mostly repeated verbatim from wiki but have not been able to pin it down to any particular form/decoration and mentioned here.
http://www.irs.ub.rug.nl/dbi/43789c2540f8f any pictures of them?
If only the runes could speak

[P Prentice]

an environmental determinist might well point to the recorded plague epidemics and volcanoe eruptions as a reason for low populations but does this explain the absence of pot - i think not.

tree taboos mark? look to the scandinavian sagas and tell me this is so.
and it is in the roman west (of central spine) where pots are absent even in the furnished grave heartlands

[Marc Berger]

so prentice are you saying that there is a period of how long after the romans when there is no pot over most of Germany and Britain? What cause say thee. (ps absence from graves is not evidence of absence)

mayby there was a shortage of clay like in Norway!!

[Dinosaur]

heres a nice little connect iron age romans deforestation marginal /not so areas type of paper http://www.archaeologyuk.org/cbanw/CBANW..._14-26.pdf

See Table 2.1, last pollen zone - err, what trees? Long gone before the Romans turn up, and never come back....didn't I say that a page or so back?