A pottery group from Ayun, Chitrāl
The pots which form the subject of this note are among the Indian collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum. They were presented to the museum in 1921 by Lt.-Col. F. C. S. Lamborne-Palmer, C.B.E., and a note in the accessions register recalls that they were discovered during the digging of the foundations of a house in the early years of the century, at Owin (Ayun) in the Chitrāl valley, now in West Pakistan. What was striking from the outset about at least one of the three vessels was its resemblance to a form of jug occurring in early contexts in Iran. But when my attention was first directed to the collection, in the early 1950's, enough was not known of the prehistory of the North-West Frontier to allow any further evaluation. During the past decade several new and interesting discoveries have been made, and one may now draw more confident inferences regarding the collection. There are three pots only.