Neolithic Pottery from Larne

Extract

In the Antrim Collection at the Ashmolean Museum is a group of sherds said to be from a chambered cairn near Lame, co. Antrim. There are no exact details of the find available, but a label pasted inside one sherd states that it was found in a tumulus in 1869. Mr. E. Thurlow Leeds first drew attention to this pottery in 1927 and indicated its importance, but it has not hitherto been fully studied.

The group is unambiguously linked by certain sherds with a small series of Scottish Neolithic wares, represented by the well-known bowls from the Clachaig and Beacharra segmented cairns, but other fragments show remarkable features which serve to isolate it as a group sui generis.

The importance of the group lies in the mixture of styles represented. The actual forms of the pottery suggest kinship with the great Windmill Hill family of the British Neolithic wares, and certain sherds (Nos. 4, 5, 11, 12, and 16) exhibit features of decoration (transverse strokes on the rim, shallow grooves, etc.) characteristic of this class alone. On the other hand, the motifs of cord impressions, both plain and whipped, hatched triangles and herringbone on the other sherds are completely unknown in the pure Windmill Hill ceramics and occur in the British Neolithic only in the pottery of the Peterborough culture. The arrangement of the ornament in panels on Nos. 1 and 3 is, however, a distinctive Windmill Hill style.