DECORATIVE DESIGN IN ANCIENT TIMES

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A Recap of the story so far - My uncle had contracted a combine harvester to cut the barley in his field when I was about 10 years old. The combine harvester wheel fell into an underground hole and a cave was discovered.

Now, to continue on with the story

We weren’t able to see much by torch light and so we put off exploring the cave until the next day. With my uncle, and my dad we explored the cave together. We found a bottom floor to the cave, but no one would be able to fit down the hole that led to it except me. At the time, as a 10 year old, I was a lot skinnier than I am now, and so I ventured into the cave’s bottom. It was a square hole and maybe about a 6 foot crawl downwards until I reached the bottom. On the bottom was a flat floor with four walls. One of the walls to my left had a square cut out of the wall, which led into another room. To enter the smaller room to the left, you’d have to crawl through the “window” area, or what looked like a “window” frame, not with glass obviously, but where you could see into another smaller room that looked like a little storage area. My parents wondered if maybe the lower room was for a safety area for kids since adults, at least adults in our day and age, weren’t able to fit down into the lower room.

We don't have the flint items from the cave, but they were similar to this one. My father has found these same type outside our family home, especially when plowing the fields.

So what did we find in the cave? There were a few flint items and a few deer bones found, which I found interesting considering that the deer native to Ireland had become extinct long ago. We also found a clay pot and this brings us to my original point of the story. The history of art and decoration.
 
The clay pot we found was decorated around the rim with a very careful series of thumb prints. In later years I wondered if perhaps the thumbprints were embedded into the clay because the potter was using his thumb to manipulate the thickness of the clay around the rim of the cup, but with the rest of the pot having a smooth surface, the thumb prints around the rim were made more noticeable. In the mind of a ten year old and everyone else concerned at the scene, we felt that sure enough it was a pattern. This was also the opinion of the Archaeologists that came out to examine the findings, which they then took to the museum.

I admit, I was a bit sad that they took all the items away, and from time to time it still annoys me. I’ve visited quite a few museums over the years and they always seem to have a surplus of these ancient relics. Why they need to collect everything that people happen to find doesn’t make much sense to me.

Over the years, from time to time, I’ve thought about that man or woman who put their thumb prints all around that pot. What were they thinking? Had the pattern any significant meaning? Was it more for decorative purposes?

Newgrange is a prehistoric monument in County Meath, Ireland. It was built during the Neolithic period around 3200 BC, making it older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids

We know that the spiral, for example, seems to be the one pattern in life that is seen everywhere, and if you’ve ever heard or read the Manga graphic novel Uzimaki you’ll see the funny side! Spirals are everywhere in nature. You can find spirals in everything from snail shells and spider webs, to hurricanes and tornados, even the Milky Way. Spirals were also important in much of ancient art, from the natives in Sedona to Celtic spirals in Newgrange, Ireland.