The eminent archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, writing of the manufacture of vessels in one material intended to evoke the appearance of another, said that "skeuomorphism often gives us a glimpse into productive activities and artistic media of which no direct evidence survives." The Pots and Pans Colloquium at the Ashmolean Museum explored the phenomenon of "skeumorphism"; surviving ceramics were treated as a relfection of gold- and silver-working traditions of which few original specimens are now extant.