Medieval Ceramics Timeline Updated in South Limburg

The Foundation

In the 1950s and 1960s, a number of medieval potteries were excavated in South Limburg. The publications regarding these production sites and the shards found there form a framework for dating medieval pottery in the Southeast Netherlands that is still used today. But are those assumptions still correct? Or can a new light be shed on the production and use of pottery in the Southeast Netherlands during the Middle Ages using contemporary knowledge and techniques?

A lack of pottery

There is a gap of 150 to 175 years in the pottery chronology currently used, Maurice explains. 'When dating Medieval pottery and its context, this pottery chronology is often definitive. It's like, "Oh, we know exactly how old this site is, because we can date it based on the pottery." But there is a gap between 900 and 1075 where nothing is found. While there are written sources from that period stating, for example, "we built a new church in this city," or something similar, but no one at that time was using pottery?'

The process

To investigate the validity of this framework, Maurice looked at a cluster of sites in the Aachen region featuring a specific type of pottery. This primarily concerns locations in South Limburg, but also on the German side of the border. To do this, he examined the excavation documentation and storage methods in the depot to see what information could still be extracted from them.

'Initially, I looked at the internal chronology of the production sites based on 25 characteristics. I have examined a lot of production waste, and you consistently find the same sequence of characteristics that you see all throughout Northwest Europe, whether you are in Northern France, on the Meuse in Belgium, in the Rhineland, or further east. These potters all do the same thing: they make the same yellow earthenware with red paint, the same decoration, etc.'

Coincidence?

That sequence also turns out to be identical to that of South Limburg production sites, Maurice discovered. 'To go back a bit, archaeologists in the 1950s and 60s were writing (and so everyone accepted) that those South Limburg production sites represent a very late form of Pingsdorf-type pottery. But what are the odds when you are making copies of something, that you happen to do it in the same sequence, but two centuries later than the rest? 'If you test that statistically, it turns out that the probability is incredibly small.'

A new framework

To provide a kind of reference point in settlement research, Maurice has drawn up a description of the pottery and clay compositions based on results he obtained in Bonn using pXRF. This is a technique that commercial archaeology can also apply without costs immediately skyrocketing. 'With this, a baseline dataset has been established with material from a number of different production sites in the region. We looked at whether you can distinguish them from one another but that is not the case. You can however, delineate them to for example Wildenrath, which is about 25 km away.'

Surprising

'What surprised you during your research?' 'Something that perhaps shouldn't have surprised me but did anyway. I examined the pottery sequence of one specific site within the excavation of the Susteren monastery. There are other people who have worked on this in the past; they did truly fantastic work. They looked at that material through a very specific lens, from Dorestad. So, viewed from a long-distance trade perspective known from the eighth and ninth centuries.'

'Someone else looked at that material through a typical late medieval lens: They are merchants, and the flow of trade follows the shortest, most efficient route, because otherwise it becomes too expensive. The surprise, therefore, was that this angle is entirely the wrong way to look at such an early medieval monastery. The unfortunate thing is that I didn't have the opportunity to conduct chemical research on this, because I had already completed that portion of my research. I expect that some of this material originates from, for example, Northern France and the region along the Main. There are techniques and materials involved that do not occur in our region but are very specific to other regions, such as micas in the temper or polishing before painting.'

'I think it's awesome to see that those exchange networks apparently don't take the most efficient route into account during that period. Even though you could have had virtually identical material from a production site less than five, ten kilometers away.' 'It would be really cool to be able to test my suspicions regarding this in the future.'