File:175 vessel drawing (FindID 70762).jpg

English: Frankish Wheel-Thrown Vessel

  Early Medieval, late 6th-mid 7th century

  Height 257mm, diameter 132mm 

 
  A wheel-thrown pottery bottle with ovoid body, narrow neck and everted rim rounded on top.  The bottle has a concave base and a maximum girth around the mid part of the body.  Height is 257mm, maximum body diameter is 132mm.  Diameter at the mouth is 62mm, at the base 79mm.  The vessel weights 956g. 

 
  Grey sand tempered fabric, the sand grains appears to be sub-angular, single sub-angular stone in the wall of the fabric.  The quality and hardness of the fabric suggests that it has been very well fired.  
  
 
  There are a series of radiating lines that have a shallow curve that runs from one side of the base to the other, these marks were produced when the vessel was removed from the wheel. 

  

  The lip curves outwards at a 45° angle.  This is where the only damage located on the whole of the vessel, there is a slight chip missing from the edge of the lip (12mm diameter). 

  
  Unlike on other bottles of its class, which are decorated with a single groove which spirals around the upper body, the decoration on this vessel comprises six grooves grouped tightly together which spiral to form four bands around the upper to mid part of the body.  Thus it seems likely that a six-pronged, rather than single-pronged, tool was used to apply the decoration as the pot revolved on the potter’s wheel.  Nonetheless, this vessel is clearly an example of a Frankish bottle of Evison’s Group Ib, with parallels from Anglo-Saxon burials at Sarre, Folkestone, Finglesham, Ozingell and Sibertswold, all cemeteries in east Kent (Evison 1979, 66-7, figs. 1-2).  Associated grave goods found with these bottles suggest deposition during the first half of the 7th century AD, although some examples were probably old when buried, with broken, filed down necks.  Therefore a date of manufacture from the late 6th through to mid-7th centuries seems probable for these vessels.

 
  References:

Evison V I 1979 A Corpus of Wheel-Thrown Pottery In Anglo-Saxon Graves. The Royal Archaeological Institute.