Rubber thumbprints

After some early Iron-Age pottery was discovered, conservator Dana Goodburn-Brown was called in to try to identify its markings.

'They looked like they were made by applying a thumb to the pottery before it was fired,' she says. 'To confirm that this was the case I used a rubber compound that's normally used by dentists for taking moulds of teeth, and applied it over the surface of the pottery, pushing it into the impressions.

'After it had dried I removed the cast and you can clearly see that it's most probably a thumb. You can see the top of the fingernail and the rounded part of the tip of the finger. It's an early Iron-Age person's thumbprint. Quite cool really.'

You can visit Dana Goodburn-Brown's website at www.amtecco-op.com

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