Pot, Bones, Slab

This pot was found upside down and resting on the sandstone slab in a burial pit under a small cairn at Pinkie Mains at Musselburgh in East Lothian. The pot contained fragments of cremated bone and charcoal and two pieces of burnt bronze.

The pot has a raised moulding around its belly. Above this is a design made by impressing a rectangular-toothed comb into the pot when wet: two horizontal lines frame a band of vertical lines.

By around 1750 BC, in mainland Scotland, cremation had become the favoured funerary custom. Cremated remains were gathered from the funeral pyre, sometimes cleanly, sometimes mixed with pyre debris, and usually placed in a large pottery urn.

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