I'm interested in that wheel. Ina Berg (M.U.) has a diagram of one in Crete, from the Early Bronze Age, and it's more or less the same type as used by Japanese studio potters up until the present day. Shoji Hamada e.g. (and his stuff still appears on ebaY at cor blimey prices). The received wisdom is that the UK 'got' the potter's wheel in the late Iron Age, that it flowered under the Roman occupation, and then was lost again until the early Medieval. I used to make my own kickwheels, and learned on one - so can recognise the early forms produced. I was in Newcastle's Museum of Antiquities (with a small stone for the Portable Antiquities Occifer) and had a look at a tripartite Collared Urn. The bottom bit - they're made out of three pieces luted together - is clearly wheelthrown, in tempered boulder clay. There's no mistaking the look. Yet these pots - Darvill mentions them as 'ubiquitous' - are attributed to Early-Mid Bronze Age. Ha!

It's no use telling anyone other than here - the actual archaeologists will just sidle away and pretend to be elsewhere. Another facet is that these wheels always had a critical bottom bearing - something that supported the shaft with minimal friction. An ideal one would be a cup-shaped depression in an unmovable rock - well, there's plenty of those about (see 'Rock Art'). Oh, and Happy Aquarius!