Abstract
Using the example of pottery imported into the Channel ports of southern England, an approach to examining the role of pottery in the emergence and mediation of coastal communities is proposed here. Building on recent scholarship, it is argued that it is no longer tenable to see pottery as a carrier of identity, or as part of a ‘cultural package’, with meaning emerging with identity as people interact with pottery within and without port environments. The study proposes that imported pottery found meaning in different ways, depending on the context of acquisition and use. Hence it mediated different forms of community and identity. The article ends with a consideration of the wider implications of this approach for ongoing studies of material culture, trade, and urban identities in medieval Europe.
Highlights
Influential work by David Gaimster (2005; 2014) has recently brought the role of material culture in the articulation of maritime identities in medieval Europe into focus
Studying the use of ceramics in Hanseatic towns, Gaimster has argued for the existence of a Hanseatic cultural package, including German stoneware and redware pottery, through which a distinctive cultural identity was expressed around the Baltic coastal zone (Figure 1)
Coastal households were joined in sets of socio-economic relationships from which distinctive, dispersed communities, mediated through the exchange of goods including pottery, emerged
Summary
Influential work by David Gaimster (2005; 2014) has recently brought the role of material culture in the articulation of maritime identities in medieval Europe into focus. We can only better understand variation in the relationships between people and objects across coastal areas through the development of interpretive frameworks and the use of a greater variety of case studies This contribution seeks to address how pottery mediated distinctive experiences in ports and how it was enrolled in the emergence of coastal communities. This requires a move beyond discussions of imports as components of ‘cultural packages’, to focus on the mediatory role of objects within social interaction. By following the flows of ceramics into these ports, we can begin to relate pottery to these maritime networks and better understand how objects mediated the emergence and re-iteration of maritime communities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, rather than limit our investigations to the mapping of the movement of goods
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