Scratch Blue

During long and strenuous cataloging sessions it is sometimes easy to lose sight of how important a single sherd or two of ceramic can really be. Take for instance scratch blue decorated white salt-glazed stoneware. We have cataloged several pieces of this stoneware, the one on the right being from Stratum 2 of Unit 54 in the Compton Field and the one on the right being from Stratum 1 of Unit 74 in the Jamieson Field.

The scratch blue technique consists of incising decorative lines on a white salt-glazed vessel, which are then filled with cobalt. Any excess cobalt is wiped away, resulting in fine blue lines. This type of design was typically used on plates, cups, teapots, and tea boxes. Common designs were linear or floral, but there was variation such as this plate decorated with a scratch blue lion, as seen on the left. Later scratch blue was debased, meaning that some of the excess cobalt was allowed to remain on the vessel, thus more closely matching German Westerwald Stoneware imports, seen below to the right. Our second piece of scratch blue more closely resembles this "debased" type

Image from If These Pots Could Talk by Ivor Hume.




Image courtesy of Jefferson Patterson Park & Museum.

So what makes these two small pieces important? Scratch blue designs were made during a short period in the 18th century, predominately from 1745-1800, following an even shorter period when the incised lines on white salt-glazed vessels were filled with brown iron-oxide rather than cobalt. This limited production of scratch blue vessels enables more accurate dating of a stratum as it places it within a particular time range. This ultimately aids us in placing a site within a broader context in relation to other archaeological sites in the surrounding area.

Kelley

Resources:
If These Pots Could Talk by Ivor Hume.
Artifacts of Colonial America by Ivor Hume.

Historic Ceramics Workshop

We had a ceramics workshop at Jefferson Patterson Park & Museum today, thanks to MAC lab director Tricia Samford who made available not only the conference room, but an excellent type collection to boot. There were fourteen in attendance, mostly CAT candidates and mostly folks planning on participating in the field session.

At lunch we walked down to part of the Smith site currently under investigation. While there I saw two very old friends...two of the original Lavish screens, now in service for about 21 years. Our new Lavish screens, which Dan Coates is building, will be online in time for the field session. I expect that we will get at least 21 years out of each and every one of them.

Jim

Field Session Registration

We are four weeks out from the Archeological Society of Maryland's Annual Field Session. For registration and details, please go to: http://www.marylandarcheology.org/fs.php

In preparation for the field session, I will offer a historic ceramics workshop on the preceding Saturday at J. Patterson Park & Museum from 10AM until 2PM. Please let me know if you intend to participate: JamesGGibb@comcast.net All are welcome. This workshop fulfills a CAT requirement. More importantly, participants will 'hit the ground running' in identifying historic period ceramics in the field and they will have the duration of their field session participation to hone that skill.

Jim

Historic Ceramics Workshop

The annual field session presents an excellent opportunity for participants to hone skills in such areas as soils description and artifact identification. Traditionally, workshops on such subjects are held at lunchtime or in the evening during the field session. During this field session (May 22 through June 1) we will continue the tradition...but we will also break with it in a way that I think will benefit everybody.

Thanks to Dr. Patricia Samford, the MAC lab at J. Patterson Park & Museum will host a ceramics workshop on May 16, 10 AM to 2 PM, in the MAC lab conference room. I will serve as instructor and, using materials from Port Tobacco supplemented with slides and handouts, provide participants with the necessary tools to identify most historic ceramics as they emerge from the ground. I expect all workshop participants to become proficient ceramic identifiers after spending just a few days in the field at Port Tobacco.

Please bring a lunch and whatever scholarly apparatus (notebooks, pencils, etc.) you think necessary. This is a CAT event, but it is open to all ASM members. See you there.

Jim

Lab Update

So as you have already read, our day out at Port Tobacco last week didn't produce the results we were hoping for, but that doesn't mean it was devoid of information. I have just finished updating our catalog and map for the area with the information from last week. The area we were focusing on was around the Chimney House, front and back. In the front of the house we found what we would expect, 18th-century artifacts.

In the back, where we were looking for the infamous carriage shop, we were looking for mid 19th-century artifacts. And, in fact, we did find some of those artifacts, including ceramics and machine cut nails. Now, by no means does this tell us anything about the carriage shop but it does tell us that there was occupation there in the time-frame we were looking for.

Some architectural debris did come out as well: brick, nails, and mortar. While it doesn't help us date anything, it is still interesting to find them several hundred feet from the Chimney House itself.

It was nice to be out in the field at Port Tobacco last week even though it was for just a day. By now you all know the history of the town and as we have all said many times, you never know what you're going to find when you put a shovel in the ground out there. Every shovel load tells us more and more about the history of the town and its occupants.

That's all for now!

- Peter

Centennial Hotel Update

After looking at our AutoCAD map, the Barbour map, and the Page survey plat along with the surrounding STP’s from that area I have come to the conclusion that we don’t know any more than we already thought. I was attempting to redefine the Centennial Hotel site for more accurate excavations in the future. I looked at the surrounding STP’s in 4 separate clumps of 6-8 STP’s to look at the distribution of 18th Century ceramics, nails, and brick rubble. What I found was that no one area separate or combined with others is any more distinct than any others. So what does this say? We know that the hotel sat next door to the Wade House and offsets the old Christ Church. Distinguishing between where the hotel was and where the Wade house was is something that can’t be done by looking at artifact distribution alone. STP collection data alone can not differentiate the two areas since they are too close together and don’t give any clear cut site locations.

The next step is to look at the STP log books to see if anything pops out of them. Brick rubble layers, depth of excavation, and oyster shell volume might help define the parameters or outline of our hotel and house locations. Further in depth excavations will be needed in the future to help solve this problem.

-Peter

Potomac Creek Ceramics

This type of pottery was first described by W.H. Holmes in 1903 named after the type site in Stafford County Virginia (ESAF, vol.10, 1982). The wares have since been expanded and refined over the years (Stephenson et al. 1963). The vessels are of a pottery group manufactured by the coiling technique with malleated surfaces. The vessels are small to large, with rounded bases. The clay is tempered with crushed quartz with or without medium sand grains. The vessels are made with hard compact clay and are usually thin. There are two types of Potomac Creek pottery: Cord Impressed in which the surface is cord marked using a wrapped stick or paddle and the Plain type which are more smooth either without cord marking or smoothed over after cord marking. This type of pottery dates to the Late Woodland period (800AD-1600AD) and has been found predominately, but not exclusively, in northwestern Virginia and throughout the lower Potomac drainage.

We know in Port Tobacco that there are three possible prehistoric sites, one in Compton field south of the old Episcopal Church, one in the Jamison field, and one in front of Stagg Hall. The majority of the prehistoric ceramics we have recovered were excavated in Compton field including all of the Potomac Creek sherds.

Above left is an example of the Potomac Creek Cord Impressed ceramic found at Port Tobacco.

Size: 2.6cm x 2.6cm (one inch by one inch)
Description: cord impressed rim with diagonol hatching either made with cord wrapped stick or paddle. Blackened (reduced) interior and reddened (oxidized) exterior, indicating that the pot was fired upside down.

- Peter

When in doubt...Ask the experts!

First let me apologize for the lack of a post yesterday.

This past week I had the task of looking more closely at the area just south of the old Episcopal Church in Port Tobacco. More specifically I was looking at the prehistoric ceramics, fire-cracked rock and lithic fragments we have found in that area to better define the prehistoric site area. So after playing with our map and outlining areas where sherds and flakes were found we decided that we need to identify these sherds to see what they were. Great idea! The problem was that Jim was out of town and I have no experience with prehistoric ceramics. So it was time to ask the experts. I contacted Dr. Charlie Hall at the Maryland Historical Trust for help. Dr. Hall was very helpful in that not only did he help me identify the sherds he explained some of the differences that you look for and how some of these vessels were made. I was also given some good reference material on prehistoric ceramics in the Maryland and Chesapeake area. Dr. Hall was not alone in helping me for he recruited Maureen Kavanagh who is the head of the office of archeology at the Trust to help as well. I want to make sure I thank them again here for their interest and help in our project at Port Tobacco.



So what did we find when looking at these pottery sherds? Out of the 9 pieces I took from the collection to identify, 5 of them were Potomac Creek, 1 Townshend, 1 Rappahanok, 1 Accokeek and 1 which was unidentifiable. Does this mean that the site we have is a Potomac Creek site dating anywhere from 900AD to 1600AD? Well not necessarily. 5 pieces of pottery is not enough to date the site without further investigation. What it does tell me is that i have to do some research on Potomac Creek ceramics so I can tell you all about them tomorrow!

-Peter

Buckley Ware

(Jefferson Patterson Park Museum website www.jefpat.org )

Hello everyone! Time for another ceramic blog. Today we are going to go over the basics of a rare piece of pottery in the Chesapeake region. While it's use in England was seen over a span of about 200 years from the 17th to 19th Centuries, in the Chesapeake area it is only seen from about the 1720's to around the revolutionary war when it was heavily imported.

The Buckley ware is a lead glazed ware made of mixed red and yellow/white clay from the northwest region of England mainly near Wales and of course Buckley. The use of two clays tends to be more obvious on utilitarian pieces than on tablewares, which are more finely and completely mixed. The two different colored clays tend to give the paste a purplish look with swirling seen in the cross section. The Buckley wares are usually undecorated with a dark brown or black lead glaze. Some ribbing from manufacture can be seen on the exterior of the vessels. A red slip can usually be seen under the glaze. Most of the large utilitarian vessels also had very thick rims.

The forms of buckley ware were a wide variety but was mostly utilitarian ware in the form of large bowls and storage jars. Other forms of table ware were also made but most of the pieces found in the Chesapeake region are those of the large utilitarian types.

At Port Tobacco we have seen ceramics from different time periods including 18th and 19th Century pottery and Native American pottery as well. Buckley ware is one of those 18th Century types that we have found during our shovel testing. Several pieces of buckley ware have made their way into our collection. As with most of our artifacts, the pieces are small and don't show us enough to define the vessel it came from but with further excavations we might find some larger pieces.

The website at Jefferson Patterson Park Museum is a great tool for identifying and learning about many of the ceramics I have discussed on the blog. It is in fact where I get some of the information I use when I compose these blogs. Here is the website address: www.jefpat.org

Tomorrow I head to the Maryland Law Library to do some research and Jim and April will be headed to New Mexico. I will post some news this week on the research I am doing as well as an updated map of Port Tobacco!

-Peter

More on the Centennial

In digging our shovel test pits along the northern part of the Compton field, we were pretty sure that we had at least one 18th-century site, possibly pre-dating the American Revolution. This period is of particular interest for a variety of reasons, not least of which is Jean Lee's book, The Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County (W. W. Norton, 1994). Dr. Lee's book, necessarily, has much to say about Port Tobacco. After all, it was the county seat and, as such, a hotbed of revolutionary sentiments as well as post-war dissatisfaction over war debts, economic depression, and foreclosures.

The Price of Nationhood is an excellent book and we are in the enviable position of reconstructing the appearance of the town in which so many of the events Dr. Lee describes occurred. The archaeological team is a little like a team of set designers, researching and describing the stage and props that provide the background to the play.

One part of the 'stage' that I wrote about yesterday was the site of the Centennial Hotel. The distributions of 18th-century ceramics and early 19th-century pearlware leave no doubt that buildings were on the site from sometime in the 18th century onward. Additional analysis will allow us to determine just how early in the 18th century. Now, a skeptic might say: hey, those are ceramics! You've shown where people threw out trash and not necessarily where they lived. Well, we have considered that issue. Take a look at this drawing.

Distribution of handwrought nails in the area of the Centennial Hotel.

The circles indicate shovel tests that yielded large quantities of masonry rubble (brick and mortar). The contours represent a simulation of handwrought nail density across the area. Handwrought (literally, made by hand) nails were used throughout the Colonial Period and into the 19th century. They were largely supplanted by machine-cut (mass-produced) nails between the 1830s and 1850s (dates vary depending on the part of the country in which the site is located).

The concentrations of handwrought nails correspond with concentrations of masonry rubble. Together they suggest four separate buildings pre-dating the middle of the 19th century. The distributions of 18th and early 19th-century ceramics clearly correspond to the distributions of architectural materials; therefore, we have found part of the stage on which Jean Lee's actors performed. Additional investigation will draw our vision of that stage into better focus.

Jim

Where is the Centennial?

As archaeologists, we pride ourselves on how clever we can be in figuring out what happened long ago with little more evidence than a few potsherds and nails. Sometimes, however, we are humbled: our clever methods produce seemingly conflicting results. That may be the story for our work around the Centennial Hotel site.

Centennial Hotel, ca. 1915.

Our shovel testing in this portion of the field owned by the Compton family produced large numbers of artifacts including those that could be attributed to the 18th century (creamware, white salt-glazed stoneware, Westerwald stoneware, etc.) and to the early 19th century (sp., pearlware). We simulated the distributions of these two groups of ceramic sherds based on the actual values recovered from our test pits. Notice the results:

Distribution of 18th-century ceramics in the area of the Centennial Hotel.

Distribution of pearlware in the area of the Centennial Hotel.

The distributions do not match. The earlier material clusters close to the village green, the later material is 50 ft further to the south. The 18th-century material corresponds more closely to the approximate location of the hotel based on the 1888 survey of the town (red polygons on the maps).

Are we seeing different patterns in trash disposal, the later material being discarded farther from the buildings, or are there two sets of structures. We need to dig more holes.

Jim

Daniel Dulany

Our notable for this week may prove to be a bit more refreshing to read about. Daniel Dulany arrived at Port Tobacco in 1703 and did not conspire to murder or find himself enslaved. He did, however, find himself indentured to George Plater II for a period of 3 years. This was not unusual as many of those who immigrated were given passage in return for a finite period of servitude.

Apparently Plater saw potential in young Dulany and he served as a law clerk for Plater. At the conclusion of his indenture, Dulany studied law in London and returned to Maryland to become a prominent Annapolis lawyer and one of the state's first major land developers. At his death in 1753, he owned 47,000 acres of land and is credited with the founding of Frederick Town, named in honor of Lord Baltimore's son. He is buried in the family vault at St. Anne's Church in Annapolis.

It is interesting to note that Dulany arrived in 1703 so Port Tobacco was already established as a major port town by then. The Port Tobacco Archaeological Project team would be quite excited to find some of the 17th century components of the site.

Note from the Managing Director: While we have not yet completed the analysis of the fieldwork to date, it is clear that we found several ceramic sherds that date to the late 17th or very early 18th centuries. We are running a little bit behind, but should have the report ready early next week.

Limits of Shovel Testing

Tuesday the team was shovel testing in front of the Chimney House and Stagg Hall. While screening the soil from STP 409, they recovered a Lincoln cent, then a Late Archaic projectile point, and then another Lincoln cent. Sometime during the process they also recovered a sherd of British Brown stoneware.

The pennies are dated 1942 and 1948. The point is several thousand years old, and the ceramic sherd is an 18th-century import (probably from before the American Revolution). Together this group of objects illustrates one of the principal limitations of digging shovel test pits that are less than 1½-ft in diameter: we can't control for stratigraphy. That is, we aren't sure whether these four artifacts came from one layer of soil or several, nor do we know if the point came from the lowest portion of the soil profile, the sherd from the middle, and the two pennies from the upper. We can be sure that they represent aboriginal, 18th-century Euro-American, and 1940s occupation of the immediate vicinity.

We do not know whether the layers of soil representing those occupations retain their integrity; that is, whether or not they have been disturbed by utility installation, cultivation, or driveway construction. That is why we need to dig larger units (3 ft by 3 ft, or 5 ft by 5 ft) in which we can carefully remove one layer, or stratum, at a time and collect the artifacts separately for each. Hopefully, we will begin digging such larger units in the Spring.

Jim

Artifacts!

Let me apologize for the lack of blogging last week as I have been out on sites and not in the office. So we've covered many things in our artifact discussions including ceramics, gun flints, and tobacco pipes. And there are many other things to talk about as well in terms of artifacts. One thing we find alot of, especially at Port Tobacco, are nails. With most sites having buildings on them, nails are sure to be found.

While today's nails are rounded and are called "wire" nails, they have changed throughout history. Nails can be traced back thousands of years and have been in use around the world.

Before the modern wire nail, we had the machine cut nail. Which was just that, a nail that was cut from a piece of flat iron to shape a nail. There were different kinds of machine cut nails too. Some had no head to them, some with machine heads and others with hand tooled heads. These nails came into use in the America's around the mid-18th Century and up until the early 20th Century.

The predecessor of the machine cut nail was the hand wrought nail which was forged from iron and were not very uniform.

While nails are always a nice find on a site because it tells us that there were buildings there, the dating of nails can be difficult at best. Since the production of different kinds of nails overlap each other in terms of time, the best we can do is use them to date by century which doesn't give us the more exact dates we always strive to find.

On another note, I hope everyone enjoyed the Thanksgiving holiday!

Pete

Thanksgiving Greetings!

On behalf of April, Pete, Scott and myself, I thank all of our supporters. The Port Tobacco Archaeological Project is an enormous undertaking that we have only just begun, but if the support and encouragement that we have received to date is any indication, we can expect a long and productive effort of which we can all be proud.

Thanks to John, Walt and Maxine: with your help Pete finished the cleaning, repackaging, and cataloguing last week. We recovered nearly 25,000 artifacts from 359 shovel tests and two 3 ft by 3 ft excavation units. At least 25% of those artifacts are ceramics dating to the founding of our nation.

Thanks to the Board of the Archeological Society of Maryland for taking a chance on this project and to the membership for providing support in the field and lab.

Thank you Maryland Historical Trust, and especially staffers Maureen Kavanagh, Charlie Hall and Bruce Thompson for logistical support and use of the laboratory. The initial Non-Capital grant made by the Trust to the project, by way of the Archeological Society of Maryland, was critical to the launching of the project.

Cathy Hardy and her staff at Charles County: your encouragement and support added to the joy of this project and increased our efficiency...the latter no small matter when so few resources are available for so large an undertaking.

Thank you Preservation Maryland and the Southern Maryland Heritage Area Consortium for grants and good wishes.

And thank you property owners and residents of Port Tobacco for allowing us to work in your charming community and for sharing your knowledge of its history.

Jim

Staffordshire Slipware

(Grigsby, 1993, p.47)


Originally I was going to blog about the piece of North Italian (also known as Pisan) Slipware. However, I need to do some research on it and show the pieces to some colleagues to get some other opinions on the piece. So instead of the Pisan, we are going to learn about Staffordshire Slipware.


The Staffordshire district in England has been making pottery for centuries. In fact there is a written reference to a potter there in 1348 (Grigsby, 1993). Slipware production started to build in the mid-seventeenth century up through the end of the eighteenth century with it starting to disappear in the colonies after the 1770's.


The slipwares from Staffordshire came in different styles which have shown up on American sites of the eighteenth Century. These styles are known as relief-decorated, trailed, combed, and marbled slipware.

The pottery coming out of Staffordshire was usually made with local materials and at first were sold locally until the mid-eighteenth century. They vary in style but the colors are the same throughout. A yellow or brown paste with differing shades of brown slips and glazes.


The decoration varied from potter to potter. The relief decorated styles had press molded designs of roulettes, royal figures, flora and fauna. Many had the date and either the name of the potter or the owner of the piece.


Trailed slipware from the area had patterns of elaborate geometric and floral patterns and were usually unsigned or dated. The process of trailing on slipware is an interesting one. At first glance it looks sloppy until you see the pattern of allowing the slip to trail off from where it was applied to form "peaks and valleys" of the different patterns.


These are just two of the examples of the different types of Staffordshire slipwares that have surfaced on excavations and in museums. I will talk more about the other kinds on another day.

The pictures above show pieces of a staffordshire slipware from Port Tobacco and a dish of the Staffordshire Trailed Slipware from the seventeenth century.

-Peter

Lab Work

Over the last two days at the MHT lab we have been able to finish washing all of the artifacts collected to date. We have also bagged half of the artifacts! Thanks to the hard work of staff and our volunteers we are well on our way to analyzing all of the artifacts. Next week we will be finishing the bagging and start to catalog all of the artifacts.

The process of bagging artifacts is an easy one: separate the artifacts by type (ceramics, glass, nails, etc...), make tags for each bag, label the bags, perforate the bags and then put into storage boxes.

A huge thank you goes out to Maxine, Walt and John for their help over the past two days in this process.

While we were cleaning and bagging, John came across a very interesting and exciting piece of ceramic...which I'll tell you all about on Monday!

-Pete

Sediment, the Neglected Artifact

Archaeologists like stuff...there's no denying it. We revel in artifacts and, most particularly ceramics. And there are good reasons for that: artifacts in general, and ceramics in particular, can be dated, described in any number of ways, and illustrated. Reports and publications rich in artifact photographs and drawings will garner more attention then those with tables, charts, and unit profiles. (Compare the tin-glazed sherd and the profile drawing from one of our units at Port Tobacco.)

It isn't surprising, then, that the bulk of archaeological data receives very little attention, both in the field and in the lab. Most of it, in fact, is pushed through screens and then disposed of in piles or used to backfill excavation units. When it comes to documenting soil, a brief description of color and texture is all that typically happens. The more fastidious will seek several colors and several textures in what many would regard as a single layer of undifferentiated soil; but even that detailed information rarely finds its way through analysis and into the main body of the report. The project team is determined not to let that happen at Port Tobacco where, we think, soils hold the key to much of what happened to the town between its founding in the early 1700s until its virtual abandonment around 1900.

April and I have been planning a detailed strategy for studying the sediments at Port Tobacco, the first stage of which occurred, and will continue, during our shovel testing. Much of that work, we hope, will be underwritten by several grants; so I will not go into a great deal of detail. We hope to use sophisticated geophysical survey equipment, specifically a ground-penetrating radar and a proton magnetometer, coupled with more conventional archaeological techniques, to recover the data that we need. We will then analyze those data with the aid of advanced computer technologies such as three-dimensional computer-aided drafting and geographic information systems.

Oddly enough, for archaeologists, we intend to use the geophysical survey equipment in the manner in which it was originally intended...to explore site geology. But that isn't to say we will not seek archaeological deposits as well. The equipment, if we are successful in securing it, will help us identify buildings, graves, derelict vessels in the river, and buried wharves and piers along the banks. Exciting stuff, all of the digital, quantitative data that these gizmos can produce; but fear not: we'll still be out there looking for and collecting artifacts, and pictures of pots and shoe buckles will take their rightful places next to the charts, tables, and profiles.

Jim

Chinese Porcelain

(Tindall, The Magazine Antiques, 1975)

Time for our weekly ceramics update!

Chinese porcelain started showing up on early colonial sites in America during the 17th Century but no exact date can be determined on when it started to appear (Noel Hume, 1969). During the 17th and early 18th Century, Chinese porcelain was not a common ware to be found in the homes of anyone except the affluent. After the 18th Century it becomes very commonplace in almost all colonial sites in America as much of it was being made specifically for export and the craftmanship had become less important than the quantity.

Chinese porcelain can be distinguished from other ceramics by its high gloss finish and very thin body which at times can be almost translucent when held up to light. It is almost always painted blue underthe glaze. Late in the 18th Century a red enamel on top of the glaze was used as well.

During our excavations of STP's at Port Tobacco we have uncovered many fragments of Chinese porcelain. Unfortunately none of the pieces recovered have any decoration and are very small which makes it very difficult to date the particular pieces. Many European and later American companies tried to imitate the Chinese porcelain with very little success.

Here is an example of a set of 18th-century Chinese porcelain tea set. Enjoy and I'll be back Wednesday with an update on our lab work at the Maryland Historical Trust.

-Peter

The Volunteer Weekend Prep

The team spent the day preparing for the volunteer weekend at Port Tobacco.

We laid in several shovel test pit transects to sample the Wade House, Centennial Hotel, and jailhouse properties, and the western portion of the village green (in front of the courthouse). Those 60 stps should keep us busy for awhile. We also brought out most of the ceramics from the previous courthouse and St. Charles hotel excavations. These artifacts have been stored in the courthouse since its reconstruction and are in need of basic sorting and identifcation; the perfect makings of a workshop on historic ceramics.

The preparations continue well after the end of the field day. This evening we are busy preparing site forms and other paperwork and loading extra supplies into the truck.

The forecast is calling for some rain on Friday, but the volunteer weekend will go on rain or shine. There is plenty of work to be done inside the courthouse. And honestly, when was the last time we had an all-day rain storm in southern Maryland? ...although I may have just jinxed us!

-April