The impressions on these pottery sherds may have been made by fern or bracken fronds during the Early Neolithic (c. 3650-3400 BC).

Although they look decorative, these beautiful marks are almost certainly accidental impressions. They offer us a rare glimpse of a Neolithic potter’s working environment, as the extremely sharp detail of the tiny veins show the clay was still wet and unfired when it came into contact with the plant. The fronds might have been growing nearby if the potter was working out in the open, but it’s more likely they were cut stems lying around a workspace. Such material could perhaps even have served as soft, protective packing for the transporting of breakable pots once they were fired.

The tiny drag marks suggest the potter may have carefully pulled the vegetation out of the vessel wall, but didn’t re-finish the surface afterwards. The pot would then have been left to dry out completely before being fired on an open surface fire to create a robust ceramic bowl. Such a bowl might have been used for cooking or serving food before it broke and was discarded, leaving these crisply preserved impressions for us to find.

With such fine detail preserved, further research may help identify the exact plant species, which could tell us more about the Neolithic landscape of Suffolk. The rise of agriculture in the Early Neolithic period is often linked to land clearance, and deforestation may have encouraged an increase in species like bracken. Fern and bracken pollen have been recovered elsewhere from Early Neolithic buried soils, such as the South Street Long Barrow in Wiltshire.

These sherds are just a small selection from a much larger group of Early Neolithic pottery and worked flint recovered from a single pit, which was surrounded by a wider spread of similar features dating to the same period.