They were made in Cornwall out of broken ARSW, I believe :)
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Replying to @caitlinrgreen @Cornwall_Museum
Sill seems odd. Broken slip ware would be very difficult material to work, especially for something that would need the balance of a spindle whorl.
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Spoke to my husband, who’s a potter. Working broken pieces of pottery would be prohibitively difficult; you could make the center hole maybe one out of twenty times. No one would do it since there were local materials at hand.
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Two possibilities; 1. African women in Cornwall who would have spun daily and brought their spindles
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2. My husband has a friend who makes similar objects as weights used in jars of pickled foods. She makes and sells the jars and teaches pickling techniques. So these may have come in jars of some food that was the actual trade good
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Replying to @painter_nancy @Cornwall_Museum
A really interesting idea, thanks! :) Fwiw, we do have recycled pot whorls from other sites e.g. recycled Roman samian ware ones from Dinas Powys & here: https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/652987 …
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Replying to @caitlinrgreen @Cornwall_Museum
Was it coil worked pottery and the bottom somehow broke off fairly cleanly? I’m sceptical of these as well; my husband said if you tried drilling the hole maybe one out of twenty would work and how would you shape it?
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We’ve all broken crockery, imagine trying to fashion something out of the shards. It’s too brittle
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Also the center hole ( and so any center dowel ) is much too big; I’ve used a drop spindle, it would be very awkward to work with and would limit the amount of yarn you could wind before unwinding
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My husband says low fire earthen ware could be easily sanded in to shape but that drilling a hole would have been very hard with a low success rate. He suggests experimenting with making holes in earthenware
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Would certainly be an interesting experiment! :)
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