The cooking, serving and preparation of food was obviously an important daily need and is represented by the pottery and various stone assemblages comprising querns and cobbled tools. Some bone tools may also be associated with dining, such as the unusual bone scoops from Broxmouth.
Although the area is often dismissed as virtually aceramic, the majority of sites, particularly in East Lothian, produce some hand-made pottery. Building on the work by Cool (1982) MacSween (2013) demonstrates that the handmade pottery from Iron Age South East Scotland is characterised by large vessels, either straight-sided, thick-walled buckets, or more inverted barrel forms, a lack of decoration and the use of large rock temper. The chronological shift from thick-walled, heavily tempered vessels to thinner-walled vessels with less temper, identified by Cool (1982), has also been noted in other assemblages from the area but MacSween (2103) rightly suggests that we cannot assume that this typological and chronological model can be a blanket model for the entire of southern Scotland.