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Toddy ladle (late 18th - early 19th cent).

Two kiln stands used to support pots when firing Castle Hill, Rattray (13 - 14 cent).

found in Kemnay, Aberdeenshire.

The Inuit of Arctic America used all the natural resources that were available to them, particularly animals, such as seal, caribou, walrus and whales, and they processed their skins, bones, tendons and even intestines into food, clothing, and equipment. They had a number of scrapers and knives developed to help in this work, for scraping and cutting skins and processing tendons. This is a scraper, or 'Tesirqun', used for scraping the hides of prey animals, particularly seals, before they were made into clothing and equipment. The iron, fan-shaped blade has a curved cutting edge and is convex, and is set into a slot in a curved bone handle. The crescentic cutting edge of the curved blade, and the hooked handle retain the traditional form of a scraper made on a single piece of bone, but this has been adapted to material traded from Europeans. The scraper comes from Chesterfield Inlet, Hudson Bay, Canada and dates from the beginning of the 20th century.

During the medieval period pottery techniques, including firing and glazing, improved greatly and the craft became industrialised. Large kilns were built in which batches of vessels could be fired. These are two of three kiln stands which were found in a kiln at Castle Hill, Rattray, Aberdeenshire, a medieval burgh. The kiln stands are wheel-thrown in a hard red sand-tempered fabric and are heavily rilled. Their profile is concave and the base wider than the rim. There are traces of green glaze on both, possibly dropped from the pots they supported, and there is blackening from being in the kiln. They date from the 14th century. These kiln stands would have been used, inverted, to hold pots upside down in the kiln during firing.]]> ABDUA:289]]>
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