Mr Piggott's survey of British neolithic pottery in 1932 revealed the dense concentration of Windmill Hill pottery in and near the Yorkshire Wolds, while in a later note Mr Sheppard drew attention to further neolithic fragments in the Mortimer collection, and published one of the Hanging Grimston bowls, newly reconstructed from fragments. But much of the Yorkshire pottery could not be traced; its existence was merely inferred from Greenwell's and Mortimer's descriptions. Recently, however, through the kindness of the authorities of the British Museum and the Mortimer Museum at Hull the writer has been able to go through the entire reserves of both the Greenwell and the Mortimer Collections, with the result that almost all the missing pottery has been traced, bowls only known from fragments have been completed, stratigraphical details have been recovered, and a large number of entirely new sites has come to light. In view of this mass of new material the time seemed ripe to attempt a complete account of the neolithic pottery of Yorkshire, including both the old and the new material, and to see what light its distribution, associations and affinities throw both on the complex interrelationships of the neolithic folk throughout the country, and on the prehistory of its own area.
Of the two main divisions of neolithic pottery, by far the greatest quantity is of the ‘A’ type; the pure ‘B’ is nowhere represented, but some half dozen sites, whose significance is discussed later, have produced sherds which show indirect ‘B’ influence.