Who Made the White Gold? Exploring the Demographics of Iron Age Salt Production in England through Fingerprint Analysis

Abstract

Ancient fingerprints preserved in clay artefacts can provide demographic information about the people who handled and manufactured them, leaving their marks as an accidental record of a moment’s interaction with material culture. The information extracted from these ancient impressions can shed light on the composition of communities of practice engaged in pottery manufacture. A key component of the process is a comparator dataset of fingerprints reflecting as closely as possible the population being studied. This paper describes the creation of a bespoke reference collection of modern data, the establishment of an interpretive framework for prehistoric fingerprints, and its application to assemblages of Iron Age briquetage from coastal salterns in eastern England. The results demonstrate that briquetage manufacture was constrained by age and sex.