How you carry and cook your food and water has been the most important question of the day for most humans since Neolithic times. (A quick backpacking trip can serve to remind oneself of this truth.) So when containers change, it means your life does too, and this was certainly the case for the British who lived through the collapse of the Ancient Roman civilization around the turn of the fifth century.
Ceramics of the kind shown here (from a first-century settlement in Usk, Whales) prevailed throughout many parts of Roman Britain until the end of the 300s, and how they were made mattered. Professional potters using a wheel and high-temperature kilns would glaze the pottery and temper it with inorganic materials (like shells) — this allowed for durable ceramics that could heat liquids to boiling, and do it repeatedly.
But by the early 400s this way of making pots was swiftly disappearing, along with the more complex markets of exchange that the Roman presence had allowed. Low-value coins and long-distance trade suffered, and increasingly, communities had to make do with a simpler style of pot-making that locals could handle: no wheel, the use of organic tempering, and no glaze turned out pots that looked like the 5th- century one from southern England shown in the second image.
And these were different — they didn’t last as long and couldn’t heat their contents as well. Robin Fleming calls the change a “deskilling and then a low-level reskilling,” which went along with a flattening of social hierarchies. Meals now would have been served up from the same bowls and been eaten on the same sorts of vessels by everybody, regardless of their social position. Society would have looked very different from 370 to 430 — the worlds were much more local, the difference between the haves and have-nots much less pronounced.
Source(s): Robin Fleming _The Material Fall of Roman Britain_, UPenn Press, 2021, chapter 3 and p. 72. Image of Usk pottery from the National Museum of Wales, “Roman Pottery.” Image of 5th century pot from Lackford, Suffolk, from University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, acquisition number 1950 .171A.
