The reconstruction cameos

For this programme Time Team organised two reconstruction cameos: one involving pottery and the other a flint axe.

The pottery reconstruction

Frances, who owns the site at Skipsea, had found many pieces of pottery while out fieldwalking. But one in particular had been of special interest to her because it contained a thumb imprint of the person who made it and she and her friends had not been able to work out what it came from.

Time Team's experts identified it as the handle from a skillet, and John Hudson, the clay potter called in for the cameo on this programme, was asked to make a replica of the original and glaze it in the same way. In fact, John was able to show that the handle of the original skillet had been put on upside down, and so included that feature in the replica.

John was also on hand to make replicas of many of the other pots that were found on the site, demonstrating clearly what kind of pottery the different fragments had come from. He ended up producing a beautiful timeline of pots, covering the duration of the occupation of the site.

John Hudson, clay potter

Remit
To make and fire on site copies of pottery based on sherds found at Skipsea.

The project
A large group of sherds, found by fieldwalking, was laid out on site in a timeline. They dated mostly from the medieval period, with one sherd from the Roman period. A choice was made from the assemblage of mainly local wares from the 11th-15th centuries.

The pieces chosen were:

Two 'pimply ware' cooking pots, 11th century
Two Beverley jugs, 12th century
Two Humber-ware jugs/mugs, 15th century
Two Wakefield cups, 16th century
One locally produced frying pan/skillet, 16th-17th century

The above were all fired. Also produced but not fired were:

One Toksey cooking pot, 11th century
One Beverley cooking pot, 12th century

The wheel, clay and glaze
The wheel was a copy of a momentum kick wheel illustrated in Piccolpasso's Tre Libre Dell'arte Del Vasio. The clays were West Yorkshire coal-measures clay and a mixed body of white-firing clay. The latter was used for the pimply-ware cooking pots and was grogged (tempered) with sand and grit. The glaze mixture was a suspension-type using clay and galena (lead sulphide) and simply poured or splashed onto the pots.

The kiln
The kiln was a simple cubic construction using fire bricks as a base and local bricks found on site. The placing-area measured approximately one cubic foot, the floor being a commercially produced piece of kiln shelf resting on fire bricks. The whole structure was open-topped, being sealed with old roofing tiles. The vent was left small to create a 'reducing atmosphere' in order to turn the glaze green. Firing was effected by two 50mm propane gas blow torches through two fire mouths at opposing corners of the structure. It took four and a quarter hours to reach a temperature of just over 1100°C. On opening the kiln, all the pots were fired and intact.

John Hudson's website is at www.hudsonclaypotter.com

Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third-party sites.

The flint axe reconstruction

As well as John Hudson's pottery, Time Team also produced a reproduction flint axe for this programme. Making this proved to be extremely time-consuming, demonstrating the amount of work that must have gone into making stone tools during the prehistoric era.

Members of the Skipsea History Group volunteered their time and energies to polishing a flint axe knapped by Phil. Their work was timed and between them, working in shifts, they clocked up an impressive 22 hours of polishing!

The volunteers' time was taken up grinding off the rough edges against a block of local sandstone, trying to get it as close as possible to the smoothness of the original found on the site. Phil was very impressed by their efforts and the results of their work, which clearly showed just how much work would have gone into producing an object like that one.

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