Potboilers Reheated

Abstract

Finds of heated stone from prehistoric sites in England were for many years interpreted as ‘potboilers’, a view recommended for the south-east of the country in particular by the finding of pots – invariably of later Bronze Age date – filled with them. When exposed to stress, stone behaves in a predictable way. A comparison of stones from apparently in situ archaeological potboilings with those produced during experimental potboilings supports the evidence of earlier work on pottery (Woods 1984) that they were nothing of the sort, the wider contextual associations of the archaeological finds suggesting instead that they comprise votive deposits. At the end of their functional life, heated stones acquired a symbolic charge, and were placed in pots in funerary contexts. This realisation both supports and qualifies Brück's recent post-modern interpretation of deposits of heated stones from later Bronze Age sites in southern England, reminding us on the one hand of the need to understand our data in terms its of its own nature – in this case geological and sedimentological – as well as its wider archaeological context, and on the other of the importance of non-traditional approaches to these. A number of other possible explanations for heated stones found in Bronze Age pots are reviewed and – for the time being – discarded.