Leaving their mark: A day in the life of a Roman pottery specialist

Fingerprints and footprints preserved in clay at a Roman kiln site in Essex. 

Pottery can be like marmite to archaeologists, some love it, some loathe it! We are all, however, fascinated by the lives of past peoples, and fired clay sometimes presents us with a particularly close link to past individuals, their fingerprints, handprints or footprints preserved in clay. That thrill of being able to place your hand in the impression of a hand from someone 2000 (or thereabouts) years ago has never left me and I am sure I am not alone in this sense of wonder.

In my role as a Roman pottery specialist, I often bemoan the ever-present clay dust that accompanies the boxes and bags of pottery that I record, and Roman pottery specialists often make light of a never-ending monotony of ‘not another bag of grey wares’. This has been particularly true of an assemblage I have recently been analysing, a late Roman (post AD 250) kiln assemblage from a site in Essex. Yes, there are tantalising stories held within these boxes of body sherds to a sherd-nerd like me, such as the relationship between local pottery production, and potters and the wider Roman social and economic environment. However, within this kiln assemblage are not just the pottery produced, but also the remains of the kilns in which those pots were fired, fragmented lumps of heat-treated clay from the kiln structure and lining, the remains of the internal kiln pedestals and numerous fragments of roughly flattened, oval clay ‘plates’. Many of these pieces display impressions made by those responsible for building the kilns, their footprints and fingerprints, all wonderfully preserved in the fired clay.

On the inner surface of the kiln construction material you can clearly see preserved the finger marks left during this process, where the wet clay was smeared and spread [Image 3].  Other marks suggest different processes; several flattened, fired clay pieces have impressions left from the pressing of straw or grass onto the surface. In addition, some of these have numerous, round impressions also pressed through into clay surface (although these also appeared on plain clay fragments too) [Image 1]. Which leaves the questions, what were those people doing?

During the assessment of this material, I posted some images of these fragments online, and asked colleagues for ideas as to how the impressions have been formed. Graham Taylor from Potted History, who specialises in creating ceramic replicas, provided a convincing answer. The clay appears to have been covered in grass or straw, then flattened by pressing down with hobnail boots [Image 2]. The resulting clay plates were most probably then used to provide a cover for the kiln during firing, to exclude oxygen from the kiln chamber and create a reducing atmosphere, necessary for all those grey ware vessels. If you are interested in watching a replica kiln being built, staff and students from the Institute of Archaeology, UCL, have made a film of their experimental kiln which you can watch here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9kOUWulZdA. There is also a great write up of volunteer run experimental kilns by Beryl Hines in the Journal of Roman Pottery Studies, Volume 15, available on line at the Study Group for Roman Pottery website.

Imprints left by both humans and animals preserved in Roman clay brick and tile have been subject to many studies and often feature in museum displays. I particularly love the child’s footprint on a tile from Lincoln (A child’s footprint from Roman Lincoln – Roman Lincolnshire Revealed).  Recently a whole adult handprint was identified on a Roman brick in Algeria, on display in the Archaeological Museum at Cherchell. At UCL, Michael Pittman, using Laser-Stimulated Fluorescence (LSF), a non-destructive imaging technique, identified the fingerprints left by a potter handling a Roman jar from St Albans.  Then there is the wonderful finger smears in a pot of Roman cream or ointment found in London (Roman cosmetics – Pre ConstructArchaeology); all of these offer personal insights into someone’s daily life.

Call me fanciful or romantic but I can’t help feel a connection to those potters in Essex through these individual traces left in the clay. These personal insights are one of the reasons I love my job. They increase empathetic practice, by which I mean moving beyond the cold practices of counting, weighing and categorising sherds. They help us as archaeologists to remember that the material we are privileged to work with is the result of someone’s lived experience, someone who invested time, energy and knowledge into the manufacture and use of these objects.  While we can’t know for sure the motivations behind their work, we can try to empathise with their practice, and personal reminders, such as fingerprints and footprints left from everyday activities are an important connection across time.

Image captions

Image 1: Piece of wet clay, which has had grass placed on the surface, then pushed in as the clay is flatted by the weight of the hobnail boot. (Image: Graham Taylor, Potted History).

Image 2: Fragment of a fired clay plate, displaying the lines impressed into the clay from grass or straw, and the irregular round impressions, possibly from a boot with hobnails. (Image K. Hawkins)

Image 3: Fragments of the inner clay surface of a kiln with visible ‘grooves’ formed by the fingers of the person building the kiln as the applied the wet clay – with my fingers above to illustrate the grooves. (Image K Hawkins)