Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology		The Collections:
	PotWeb:	Ceramics online @ the Ashmolean Museum	•	Early Europe & Near East
			•	Classical to Medieval
			•	Europe from 1500
			•	Oriental & Islamic

2000 years of pottery forms and shapes

Pottery vessels used by people in antiquity can be classified into shapes familiar to everyone today.

The catalogue will begin in the first century AD before the Roman Conquest and culminates with studio pottery of the twentieth century AD. The ceramic vessels are drawn largely from archaeological sites and supplemented by material privately collected, now curated by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

This is the structure of the online catalogue that is currently under development. There will be three levels of information:

	A thumb-nail image with recommended name for the form
	A standard image with the common name of the ware, its height, unique PotWeb identifier, production centre, distribution, use, specific date, publication, historic context and collector/excavator; the common name also appears as a floating caption to the thumb-nail image
	Detailed images will be included where necessary
	Chronological periods represented in this study:

	Romano-British	AD 43 - 400
	Early Saxon	AD 350 - 650
	Middle Saxon	AD 650 - 850
	Saxo-Norman	AD 850 - 1150
	Early Medieval	AD 1000 - 1250
	Highly decorated	13th - 14th centuries
	Late Medieval	AD 1350 - 1450
	Early Post-Medieval	AD 1450 - 1600
	Post-Medieval	AD 1600 - 1720
	Modern	1720 -

The terms used above are set out in H. Blake & P. Davey Guidelines for the Processing and Publication of Medieval Pottery from Excavations (HMSO 1983)

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© Copyright University of Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, 2001 The Ashmolean Museum retains the copyright of all materials used here and in its Museum Web pages. last updated: jcm/6-dec-2001