April 2025 – ANTH 361 Experiential Pottery

Wrapping Things Up!

Hello, and welcome to our final post here at the ANTH361 Medieval Pottery blog! We have a few parting words and final thoughts to share with you before we wrap up for the semester.

Firstly, our final poster titled, “Shaping the Past: Experiential Archaeology and Medieval Pottery” has been finished and printed! We are incredibly proud of the finished product – as well as grateful for Bridget’s excellent Canva skills and advice! – and are very happy with how it turned out. Attached below is a picture of our poster, and we will link a PDF version at the very bottom of this post.

Our finished poster!

Seeing our poster as well as our finished pottery pieces (as well as the shards of those which did not survive the firing) was such a rewarding experience! Being able to look at a tangible display that symbolized and presented our weeks of hard work was incredibly cool. Getting to elaborate and explain our process to curious passers-by was also satisfying, and made us proud of our work.

Our poster as well as our fired clay bowls and shards as displayed in the Cornett building.

Ultimately, our adventure into Medieval pottery was not only fun and enriching, but also highly thought-provoking and insightful. It’s really powerful how experiential and experimental archaeology can open a window into the past in a way that other forms of scholarship and academic research cannot! It’s so important that modern academia is now beginning to (in some circles and capacities, at least) become more open to alternate ways of studying the past, because if our journey taught us anything, it’s that experience is just as important as other forms of learning.

Sending out sincere thanks to everyone who has followed us along on this journey! Who knows, maybe some Medieval pottery pursuits are in your future as well!

Thanks for reading,

Alex, Bridget, and Lily

ANTH361 Shaping the Past Experiential Archaeology and Medieval Pottery Download

Looking Back and Reflecting!

Hello readers!

As the semester comes to a close and we wrap up ANTH361, we wanted to reflect back on this project and the skills acquired, hardships faced, and lessons learned along the way. Firstly, we want to think back on the long, arduous, yet incredibly rewarding process that was our adventure into Medieval pottery! Our journey was broken into four important steps: harvesting the clay, clarifying and processing the clay, making our pottery, and finally firing our pieces, (hopefully) turning them into finished products. Each step came with its own learning curve – most of us had never worked with natural clay before, and it was definitely something to get used to.

Bridget taking a picture of Alex with the raw clay!

One major theme that we found ourselves reflecting on throughout the semester was a sense of proximity to the past, and how experiential archaeology provides a unique opportunity for not only anthropologists, but really anyone to be able to experience similar events to the communities which came before us. Simple details like listening to the wind blowing through the grass while picking rocks out of our clay, or the crackling of the fire as it toughened up our pots, are common experiences that our Medieval counterparts likely also shared; more than just an interesting project, our pottery project lent us invaluable and firsthand insight into what these Medieval processes might have looked like, and even felt like for those involved.

Beyond this, our adventure allowed us to reflect more on the process of Medieval pottery-making itself. In a modern, highly industrialized world, simple items like bowls and plates are everywhere around us, and are one of the things that many may take for granted. Whether it be the rows of colourful dish ware in Ikea, the racks of plates and bowls at the University of Victoria Cove dining hall, or even the festive mugs and cups at your local Dollarama, eating and drinking vessels surround our daily lives. However, this experience in creating Medieval pottery truly opened our eyes to the painstaking and highly skilled process that is pottery-making.

Despite having all the required materials and resources, completing even a single step takes a long time; it turns out your hands can get quite tired after breaking down dried bits of clay that are stuck in your working pile, and making sure no worms are harmed in the process! Even after the four steps are completed, your pottery isn’t out of the woods: some of our pieces unfortunately did not survive the firing process.

Getting our pottery ready to fire.

The unpredictable and messy nature of making Medieval pottery made us reflect back on how this arduous process might have affected Medieval individuals. The amount of skill it takes to be able to confidently create pieces that are able not only to survive baking but also function well as dish-ware likely necessitated skilled craftspeople and a functioning understanding of clay properties. Moreover, it must have taken a long time to create even a fraction of the dishware the average modern human goes through in a day; imagine spending days on a plate, only for it to break in the firing process, landing you back at square one!

Overall, this project was a thoroughly fun, thought-provoking, and special journey, and nothing like any one us had experienced anything before! Stay tuned for pictures of our final poster and some final thoughts as we wrap up the semester.

Thanks for reading!

Step 4: Drying and Firing!

In my previous experiences drying the clay, I found out that there is a higher rate of success when the clay is dried very slowly, and completely. If the clay dries out too rapidly, cracks can form in the structure of the objects. Once those cracks form, there is really no way to fix them, so it’s best to prevent them in the first place.

In order to ensure that the objects dried as slowly as possible, we covered them in loose paper bags to trap some of the moisture in.

We left the farm and headed back down to Victoria for the next two weeks of classes, and the next weekend I was able to go back to Duncan to fire the now fully dry clay. Different sources gave different answers for exactly what temperature the fire would need reach in order for our clay to become pottery, but regardless we knew we would need to build a large and very strong fire. We started the fire without the clay objects in order to get it going and create a bed of embers.

Once the fire was burning well, we split the fire in two sections, and carefully placed our objects in the middle. We set them down carefully, and then decided to flip them upside down so that the heat could be trapped inside of the bowls and hopefully bake more evenly.

Once all the objects were inside the fire pit, we pushed the two sides of embers back together and built the fire back up around the clay objects using both larger and smaller pieces of firewood. I think that this was a good way to approach this process, as it allowed us to place the objects down very carefully to decrease the risk of accidentally breaking them.

Now that we had built a large fire with lots of fuel, we sat back and let the fire do its thing.

The fire burnt for a couple of hours, and we decided to let it cool on its own accord so that the objects could cool down gradually and not be shocked by the temperature change. It was a little difficult to be patient as I was so excited to see how things turned out, but I knew that the objects would be in their most fragile state until they’d fully cooled down. Once the ashes were only a little bit warm, we were able to uncover our treasures.

My first impression is that it was amazing to see the colour change that the clay went through during the firing process. The natural clay straight out of the ground was a dark, murky sort of gray colour. Our fired pottery became a rich terra cotta orange, and even though the shapes of our pots really showed our beginner level experience with shaping pottery, the objects were still quite beautiful and organic.

As we dug through the ashes, we were sorry to see that a few of the pots did not survive their journey. While this was a little bit disappointing, it was expected, and the good news is that the damage was evenly spread out amongst the members; everybody had at least one of their objects make it out unscathed!

Once fully cooled, we carefully wrapped up the objects in newspaper and placed them in containers to transport back to Victoria, to show the rest of the group and to proudly display in the Cornett building. We chose to bring some of the broken shards as well for people to be able to feel and see the patterns and lines where the clay broke. I think the highlight of feeling these clay objects is tapping on them- you can actually hear where the clay reached the highest temperature based on the sound you hear!

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading about our process nearly as much as we enjoyed experiencing it ourselves! This was a really unique undertaking and we all learned a lot about hands-on education, all while having a whole lot of fun!