Urn

All prehistoric pottery was made by hand; the potter’s wheel had not yet been invented. Aside from their normal domestic uses, pots were also sometimes used as burial urns. The ashes from the funeral pyre and the cremated remains would be placed in the urn, which would then be buried in an urn field. This is a so-called Drakenstein urn. Urns of this type generally have impressed ‘cordon’ decorations beneath the rim and are otherwise unembellished. In the main, pottery from the Early Bronze Age is coarse and adulterated with large pieces of quartz or gravel.