IELTS Practice Test 11

Reading Passage C: Prints in the Clay

A When a potter shapes wet clay, the skin of the fingers leaves tiny impressions in its surface. Most are smoothed away as the vessel is finished, but some survive on the inside of a pot, under a handle or around the base, and once the pot has been fired they become permanent. For archaeologists, these accidental marks offer something rare: a direct physical trace of an individual who lived thousands of years ago.

B The idea of studying such prints is not new. In the 1930s, collectors occasionally noted fingerprints on ancient pottery, but they treated them as curiosities. Systematic work began only when researchers realised that the width of the ridges on a fingertip changes in a predictable way as a person grows. Children have finer ridges than adults, and on average women's ridges are slightly narrower than men's. By counting the number of ridges within a fixed distance, it became possible to estimate the age group and, less reliably, the sex of the person who made the print.

C At the hillside settlement of Varo Alto, Lucía Ferrante examined more than 600 prints on cooking pots and storage jars. She found that a surprising proportion, almost one in five, had been made by children aged roughly ten to fourteen, mostly on the smaller cooking pots rather than the large jars. Ferrante interprets this as evidence that pottery was learnt within the household, with young people producing everyday wares before they were trusted with larger, more valuable vessels.

D Such conclusions depend on accurate measurement, and Henrik Dahl has pointed out a complication. Clay shrinks as it dries and again when it is fired, so a print on a finished pot is smaller than the finger that made it. If this is not corrected, adult prints can be mistaken for those of adolescents. Dahl's experiments with modern potters suggest that shrinkage varies between about 5 and 15 per cent depending on the clay, which means that each site's material has to be tested separately. Ferrante accepts the point but notes that her figures already include such a correction.

E Others are cautious about what the prints can reveal. Nomvula Pretorius argues that a fingerprint shows only who touched the clay, not who designed or owned the pot; a child might simply have carried or turned a vessel made by someone else. She recommends combining print evidence with other traces, such as the marks left by particular tools, before drawing conclusions about who did the work. Even so, she describes fingerprint studies as one of the few methods able to make the anonymous workers of the past visible.