“Nobody cares about cruddy little bits of pot”, surmised the student of fine art at our mutual friends’ wedding, over a decade ago. Having just submitted a thesis on the subject, I was inclined to agree and let fireworks fill the pregnant pause. The title of Alex Gibson’s new book suggests things have changed. Gone is the ‘prehistoric’ moniker that led the way in the author’s previous mainstays: Prehistoric pottery in Britain and Ireland (Gibson Reference Gibson2002) and the still-essential Prehistoric pottery for the archaeologist (Gibson & Woods Reference Gibson and Woods1997). Now there is ‘art’ and a deeper sense of confidence in the archaeological, social and cultural importance of pots. In the past 20 years pottery has become more mainstream in British cultural life—an antidote to hyper-connected doom scrolling—as reflected in popular TV shows such as The Great British Pottery Throw Down (BBC/Channel 4). Our potters are (re)awarded like never before; think of Edmund de Waal CBE, Dame Magdalene Odundo and, of course, Sir Grayson Perry.

In this zeitgeist, British pottery feels more relevant and important than ever before. The book’s stated aims are to reach a wide audience and provide historical background to modern pottery studies, to awaken interest and provide insight into the more arcane nuances of Neolithic and earlier Bronze Age pottery while keeping academic references to a minimum (pp.xix–xx). Doing so, and holding the reader’s interest along the way, is no mean feat and, for the most part, Gibson succeeds. There is an opening foray into technology (Chapter 1) and, throughout the book, areas of methodological development and opportunity are signposted. Most notable is the under-reported doctoral study of Lucija Šoberl on lipids (Šoberl Reference Šoberl2011), which leads to the wry observation that British Beaker drinkers were happier with ‘Horlicks than Heineken’ (p.85). It is remarkable that there have been no dedicated or sustained petrological projects on Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age British pottery (p.168) given the quantity and quality of analyses carried out on other contemporary materials.

The bulk of the book (Chapters 2–7) is taken up by a chronological run-through of pottery traditions in half millennial chunks. This long-term overview allows for unexpected connections, echoes and renaissances in style, decoration and form to emerge: for example, how Early Neolithic Carinated Bowl pottery feeds into Middle Neolithic Impressed Ware forms (pp.63–64) and the ongoing debates around the influence of those Impressed Ware decorative techniques on much later (Early Bronze Age) Food Vessels (p.57, pp.113–14). Not every chapter grips the attention. The most engaging are, unsurprisingly, those with the best stories to tell, from Grooved Ware’s pan-British and Irish sense of connectivity to the curiously varied and eclectic forms of the Early Bronze Age (i.e. c. 3000– 1500 BC) and what those differences mean in terms of regionality and changing constructions of identity and cosmology. The narrative drive tails off in Chapter 7 as the British Bronze Age shifts into a world that prioritised selective metalwork deposition and settlement (c. 1500–1000 BC).

British pottery reaches its acme in showing how ceramic studies pervade the history of later prehistory, from antiquarians and early archaeologists such as William Greenwell, to the narrative fabric of the Neolithic and Bronze Age studies (re)told by aDNA studies today. The twists and turns occupy much of Gibson’s attention. As he notes in the final chapter, “we need to know how we got to where we are” (p.165). That may seem glib, but it carries a twofold perception of pottery trajectories: one in the past, in terms of obtaining a better grasp of the genealogy of pottery styles and, the other, in the present. Alison Sheridan once warned that Early Bronze Age pots “were not designed for the convenience of twenty-first-century ceramic classification” (Reference Sheridan, Gibson and Sheridan2004: 246). And yet what makes the study of prehistoric pottery so compelling and important is precisely the way that clay’s mutability captures attempts to conform to traditions that may or may not follow the same chaîne opératoire or even match the potter’s initial intentions. As Gibson notes, every pot that, to twenty-first-century eyes, appears to ‘belong’ to a tradition was made by an individual working “within wider cultural constraints” (p.167). In other words, the process of (re)interpreting pottery classification was probably as active and contested an issue in the Neolithic and Bronze Age as it is now. Unpicking the tensions between national, regional and site/cemetery scales and between prehistory and the present is a critical matter that points towards the pottery studies of the future.

A few additional references would have added to the pot: a discussion of the implications of Meredith Laing’s (Reference Laing2022) recent doctoral work on fingerprint impressions on pots would have supplemented Gibson’s discussion of similar research at Ness of Brodgar, Orkney (pp.14–15, p.167); while the recent AHRC-funded “Grave Goods” research project’s take on the understated but crucial role of earlier Bronze Age funerary pots (Cooper et al. Reference Cooper2021: 145–84) could have sparked some deeper engagements on matters of selection and aesthetics. The illustrations in British pottery are always useful and copious; however, looks have not always been on the side of prehistoric pottery so when a ‘good’ pot comes along it would be nice to make more of a fuss of it. As Gibson shows for a group of exceptional pots from Northumberland (pp.10–13), there are some very special Early Bronze Age vessels, indicative of the value and effort that could be invested in their creation, but they are shown alongside a far more modest panoply of pots, funerary or otherwise. That lumpen mix is the riddle and challenge of studying—and publishing—this material.

It is testament to the centrality of pots— and Gibson’s honed narrative—that I often forgot this was a book about pottery rather than, say, the social, funerary or cosmological foundations of prehistoric Britain. Forty years ago, Daniel Miller (Reference Miller1985) noted the potential of pots to be ‘framing’ objects; covert devices for archaeologists, taking soundings of social and religious practices while also being of important symbolic significance. That duality and centrality has never been fully acknowledged or its benefits and potentiality reaped for the study of prehistoric Britain or north-west Europe. Perhaps the mundanity and poor aesthetic quality of much prehistoric pottery has masked this critical and full(er) role. The central message of British pottery for the next generation of not-so-uncouth ‘sherd nerds’ is, thus, quietly radical. Shake off the art historian’s pretension; take advantage of the masking and unassuming role of clay’s mutable properties and let the interpretative fireworks follow.