Fun With Fire

Spent the weekend up camping with friends at Hebden Bridge Camping. The trip was mainly about attempting to test latest theories of how Bronze Age pottery was made, although we managed to make it a party as well. The campsite is run by my sister, Georgina and her partner Phil. They very kindly allowed us to have our Bronze Age pottery experiment.

As no Bronze Age kilns have been discovered yet, the basic theory is that they made pots as part of the general household tasks and fired them in the round house hearth. This meant no extra fuel collecting, which was expensive in time and energy. For more details on the theories and processes check out Ceramicals blog.

With a weather forecast of autumn storms arriving on Sunday, we had to take the whole process through in one day. This meant there was a danger of exploding pots if we didn't dry them out well enough. In the end, we went from raw clay to fired pots in less than twelve hours. Happily there were hardly any breakages.

Clayworking Tools

Working On The Pieces

Drying Them Out

Stacking Pots In The Fire

Stoking Up

Blazing Merrily

Horse Sculpture First Out

The Ashes

Porridge Bowl

Teatime

As you can see from the pictures, although the resulting pots were fired at relative low temperatures, they are capable of holding food and drink. All in all a great success and a fun learning process.

Thanks go out to Georgina and Phil for providing the venue for our experiment, Rachel from Hive for coming up with the idea and Gill from Ceramical for writing it all up in a more technical way.