The La Tène Art Style in British Early Iron Age Pottery

Abstract

It is a commonplace that of all the mobile art-forms of prehistoric times pottery is the least mobile and the most domestic. It would be wrong to assert categorically that never before the Roman period or the years immediately preceding it was pottery the subject of trade and transport; but the traffic was at least on a limited scale. Unlike objects of metal, therefore, which may wander far from their place of origin in the course of trade or other movement, pottery closely reflects in its distribution the relationship between culture and geography.Pot-making, too, is a comparatively lowly, if an expressive, craft. In a wealthy community, or in a community with varying levels of wealth, pottery takes second place to metal or (where it exists) glass: usually, therefore, pottery is the borrower both of form and of ornament. And while with an inventive people the result may in due course be something new and significant in itself, in less fortunate circumstances—as for instance under the mass-production methods of Roman times—the potter's debt becomes a lifeless imitation of, or a negative development from, the forms and motifs of the superior materials.

A Contribution to the Study of Glastonbury Ware from South-Western Britain

“…14, 1. Pos-2 Grimes (1952). This was previously sugsibly the sherds from Cam Zennor, Leeds (1927), gested by Wheeler (1943), p. 217.…”

An Excavation at the Coastal Promontory Fort of Embury Beacon, Devon

“…Very few Group 1 sherds are recorded further east than Embury. Discussions of Glastonbury Ware and its origins are to be found in Wheeler (1943), Grimes (1952) and Radford (1951). There are also a few sherds of a very coarse ceramic which are very different from most of the sherds but are not stratified with them.…”

‘Fancy Objects’ in the British Iron Age: Why Decorate?

“…Some fantastic examples of decorated pottery exist, such as the famous Glastonbury Ware (Grimes 1952) but, on the whole and for the majority of the period, pottery does not seem to be a medium on which decoration is consistently employed (Cunliffe 2005, appendix A). There are periods and regions which are completely aceramic and others where decoration is more common (Sharples 2008).…”