The La Tène Art Style in British Early Iron Age Pottery

Extract

It is a commonplace that of all the mobile art-forms of prehistoric times pottery is the least mobile and the most domestic. It would be wrong to assert categorically that never before the Roman period or the years immediately preceding it was pottery the subject of trade and transport; but the traffic was at least on a limited scale. Unlike objects of metal, therefore, which may wander far from their place of origin in the course of trade or other movement, pottery closely reflects in its distribution the relationship between culture and geography.

Pot-making, too, is a comparatively lowly, if an expressive, craft. In a wealthy community, or in a community with varying levels of wealth, pottery takes second place to metal or (where it exists) glass: usually, therefore, pottery is the borrower both of form and of ornament. And while with an inventive people the result may in due course be something new and significant in itself, in less fortunate circumstances—as for instance under the mass-production methods of Roman times—the potter's debt becomes a lifeless imitation of, or a negative development from, the forms and motifs of the superior materials.