12th November 2014, 10:04 PM
P Prentice Wrote:its not difficult to make a pot, people had managed for a few millennia. but its absence over vast swathes of britain for a considerable period - even where it had been made alongside the furnished grave tradition/sfb zone surely points to deliberacy?
But if you, for the previous 400ish years have got used to having a bloke down the street selling cheap mass-produced pots, and living in a society based around a market economy where money talks, and then suddenly (yeah, I know it wasn't necessarily so suddenly in some areas, but...) that economy collapses and you have no way to pay said potter, would you then be able to re-learn the art to a sufficient level to produce large quantities of what was, in effect, a throw-away item, or, would you make do with whatever else you could use and that doesn't rely on acquiring the right clay, learning what to add to it to make it fire right, how to construct a kiln... But, as some of us have already said, there may well have been, along with the change in economic structure, a change in fashion. For instance, how about a change in cookery, from eating a lot of boiled/fried food that requires some form of vessel to eating foods that are cooked directly on or in a fire?
From what little I know, it's rare for a change in what we see in the ground to have been caused by a singular event. Unless you're talking something like the destruction of Pompeii or the like of course. Usually it's the coming together of range of different events and/or circumstances.
I reserve the right to change my mind. It's called learning.