ABSTRACT
The problem of the origins of the food-vessel is still far from fully solved, and this is not the place to discuss it at length. But these flat-based, broad-bodied pots, with their angular shoulder, short, often hollow neck, and everted rim with a peculiar (and usually decorated) internal bevel, are in any event to be ascribed to some sort of interaction between beakers and other forms of pottery. And that the beakers in question are less A than B, or more strictly B2 beakers, is clear from their preference for horizontally banded as against panelled decoration, and, outweighing the A beaker’s notched comb-stamping, for the incised and above all the cord-omament technique in which the B2 beaker is so strong (especially in bands of repeated chevrons). At the same time the other forms involved include Neolithic B, as neck and in part rim and shoulder form shows as well as whipped-cord, finger print, and other such decoration; the ornamenting of the bevel inside the rim, in particular, can only be derived from this source. But, to say nothing of bowl-forms belonging to the Beaker culture (polypod types (p. 257) included), grooved ware must be included also, as appears in types prominent especially in Scotland whereon hollow neck and angular shoulder are replaced1 by shoulder-and collar-mouldings in a field of ornament running to ‘ ladder-pattem’ and to plastic work. Here also the influence of wooden vessels, on which in the last resort the whole idea of the food-vessel form may be based, comes out strongly in the decorative device of rows of alternating tool-impressed triangles, to simulate chipcarving or fretwork, leaving a zigzag of clay standing out between in what is termed False Relief,2 which begins to appear on bell-beakers in Catalonia and Central Europe and was perhaps here derived from Bell-beaker wood-work through the Grooved-ware people. Finally, the pottery of the megalith-
builders in Scotland may have supplied, e.g., stab-and-drag and whipped-cord motives: one famous Scottish food-vessel from Doune in Perthshire even attests influence from the Danish Passage-grave people (p. 191). But the actual course of multiple interaction which produced these results is still somewhat mysterious. In particular, the distinctive grooving of the angular shoulder, and its interruption-often extended also to repetition on the neck-by lug-like stops, properly (but not always) pierced to take a suspension-cord, is a feature for which, since a Pyrenean origin seems impossible (p. 309), no satisfactory derivation can at present be found at all. And the origin of the vase food-vessel will probably remain mysterious so long as our knowledge remains practically confined to sepulchral pottery and covers so little of the domestic ware of settlement-sites. Sepulchral finds, mainly from round barrows like those of Yorkshire, and the stone-slab ‘ short cists’, with or without barrow or cairn, of Scotland, do at least tell us something about its relative chronology. In Scotland it is partly at least contemporary with beakers: further south there may still be an overlap, but in Yorkshire barrows food-vessels are definitely later than beakers. And in distribution the food-vessel is partly overlapping, partly peripheral, and partly exclusive to the beaker. It looks at present as if Scotland may have the most to contribute to the solving of the food-vessel problem, especially the Forth-Tay region where Neolithic B and B Beakers are known to have been neighbourly-though there are parts of the north of England where the same may prove true, and even further south, as on the Upper Thames or round the Fens, a sort of food-vessel pottery, compounded of Neolithic B with seemingly B Beaker and some Grooved-ware elements, stands out here and there in contrast to the A Beaker ware, and fives on, keeping alive above all the tradition of cord-ornament, to achieve a fuller emergence in the Middle Bronze Age. And Scotland also had its Grooved-ware element: it may be traced not only in its contributions to the food-vessel family just noticed, but more strikingly in the far north in the pottery of the extraordinary stone-built hut-setdements which follow the period of the megalithic tombs in Orkney. It is impossible
here to describe in full the renowned settlement of Skara Brae. But the kinship of its plastic-encrusted and grooved pottery to the grooved ware of the last chapter (p. 272) is unmistakable, and the recent discovery at Rinyo, not far away, of the priority of an analogous setdement to a beaker, of late C form derived from the A Beaker series centred in Aberdeenshire, gives the culture a date in the Early Bronze Age which sets it and the food-vessel question in clear perspective to one another.
