Spring24_Week6 – Experimental Archaeology / Experiential History

Lab Summary Week 6: Cremation & Pottery Firing

By Alex Wilson and Hope Yu Introduction For our sixth lab of the term, we constructed a funeral pyre to test medieval practices of cremation while also firing our early medieval English clay pots from lab three. This lab tended toward the experimental as much of Professor Austin’s research revolves around Anglo-Saxon medieval cremation and…

Week 6 Lab Data: Pottery Firing

This week we fired the clay pots we made in Week 3. My group, Group E, fired our pots together with Group F. We measured the data for three pots: Hope’s pot, Elek’s pot, and Gisele’s pot – in other words, one from each group (Hope’s and Elek’s from E and F, respectively) and one…

Week 6 Group C Lab Data: Cremation/Pottery Firing

Overview: For this week’s lab, my group (Group C) was working with Group D to build the cremation pyre in the center of the island. Additionally, we fired our 6 pots in order to test how well they would survive based on the tempers that were used to create them, in a callback to the…

Week 6 Group A Lab Data

This week in the lab, my group fired the pots we made in week 3. Our firing took place in a metal fire pit about two feet in diameter. We began by warming the pots around a small teepee fire in the center of our pit to raise the temperature to 230 degrees Celsius. This…

Group D Cremation Lab Data Report

During this week’s cremation lab, Group D’s focus was on firing our pots in the actual funeral pyre! Before diving into the quantitative data which I collected throughout this process, I will include some (rudimentary) illustrations I made of the pyre’s composition, displaying the step-by-step process of how we built it and how we positioned…

WEEK 6 GROUP F DATA: Pottery Firing

This week my lab group, group F, fired the pots we had made during week 3. As the data recorder, I noted the temperature of the fire and a few specific pots throughout the process, as well the times at which we performed different steps. The specific pots listed below in the “Pot Temps” column…