David R. M. Gaimster. The Historical Archaeology of Pottery: Supply and Demand in the Lower Rhineland, ad 1400–1800; An Archaeological Study of Ceramic Production, Distribution, and Use in the City of Duisburg and Its Hinterland. Studies in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology 1, British Archaeological Reports International Series 1518. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2007. 270 pp.; 131 illus., maps, plans, drawings, graphs, and tables; 8 appendixes. £37 (hardcover).
Studying museum collections carries with it one important caveat—museums usually buy the best. You see the bragging pieces from the court cupboard, such as the Kraak porcelain, rather than the everyday wares, which varied depending on trade and transportation. For example, except for a Portobello Road antiques market find by the Noël Humes, all known Iberian standing costrels are archaeological.[1] These quart-sized bottles are found on essentially every Virginia site occupied between 1607 and 1640 and in many United Kingdom ports as well. Excepting those, London’s concentration of at least seventeen Iberian costrels represents more examples than have been reported from all the rest of the world. These vessels appear to have been imported by London traders and were used to retail liquids shipped to Virginia in barrels.[2] To know which wares were used at a specific place, it is necessary to have archaeologists dig them from the ground.
Written by David Gaimster, one of the world’s foremost scholars, The Historical Archaeology of Pottery: Supply and Demand in the Lower Rhineland, ad 1400–1800 documents the ceramic assemblage from the Rhine River town of Duisburg, in modern Germany. The book falls into a genre I call “bombed cities.” Rebuilding Europe after World War II uncovered countless artifacts. Some municipalities launched programs of archaeological research and published treasure-trove catalogs of finds from the rubble.
As a “bombed cities” group, Duisburg can be cross-referenced against Amsterdam, Southampton, Norwich, Exeter, and Rotterdam.[3] All of these locations had local potters. All of these archaeological collections also contain the basic wares carried around the world by Dutch traders, including slipwares, tin glazes, Chinese porcelain, and Rhenish stonewares. Most of these wares were sold in English North America before the Navigation Acts restricted trade in about 1680. With Duisburg, the major variation seems to be a lack of Iberian wares. Iberian pottery reaching America included tin-glazed and various Merida forms, but most Iberian exports were shipping containers, typically olive jars.
Today names like Merida come so easily that American archaeologists forget that not long ago all of our sherds were unidentified “broken crockery.”[4] The idea of excavators studying people described in written records is so new that the first major report on Jamestown did not appear until 1958. The discussion of the ceramics, by Edward Jelks, cited four published sources. North Devon pottery was just being recognized, and Jelks was helped by Malcolm Watkins, who wove the Jamestown finds into his 1960 landmark study.[5]
In the evolution of archaeological knowledge about ceramics, the world changed in 1969 with Ivor Noël Hume’s Guide to the Artifacts of Colonial America.[6] When I began at Virginia’s Flowerdew Hundred site in 1984, Charley Hodges, Tony Powell, and the late Jim Deetz taught me pottery with constant references to the Guide. Historian Ed Ayers did not allow us to take the Guide out into the mud, but our field equipment included a filthy copy of Noël Hume’s Martin’s Hundred.[7] Martin’s Hundred matched Flowerdew in a thousand ways and, showing no mercy, we requested every one of its citations through the kind ladies at the local Hopewell Public Library.[8]
Noël Hume and his now-deceased wife, Audrey, visited frequently. I remember the day he told Jim that the Batavia wrecked the theory of dating by Bellarmine masks.[9] Tony, Charley, and I had just reached that conclusion, thanks to our ladies of Hopewell, but dared not utter the heresy.[10]
Noël Hume gave us Pottery Produced and Traded in North-west Europe, 1350–1650 by John Hurst, David Neal, and H.J.E. van Beuningen, which became my first “bombed city” reference.[11] It is a dictionary of wares found in Rotterdam, home to many of the Dutch who traded pots around the world. Hurst, the heart of research in northwestern Europe, became my pen pal. We talked for years before I learned that he ranked among the greatest archaeologists in British history—John was that modest. As a part of his network, Virginia had friends beyond the horizon.
Back then—1992—we had James River mud between our toes and felt like country stepchildren with empty pockets. Then we realized most European contexts are nightmares of overlapping deposits—1850 paving 1710 cutting 1620 burying 1590. Our lost plantations, occupied for a decade or two and never touched again, are almost as good as shipwrecks.
A mugger murdered the good John Hurst, but his spirit of international cooperation survives. When Al Luckenbach sent images of the Swan Cove (Maryland) crumhorn pipe, I emailed them to Ranjith Jayasena, who passed them to Don Duco. Within hours, Duco emailed Luckenbach an equally odd Dutch parallel.[12]
Hurst’s network included David Gaimster, then a curator at the British Museum and now the general secretary of the Society of Antiquaries. Gaimster’s publications include German Stoneware, 1200–1900, a guide to the vessels at the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Museum of London.[13] The Duisburg book originated as his dissertation and was scheduled for publication in the early 1990s but became trapped in bureaucratic limbo.
Gaimster presents his assemblage—seventy-nine pages of pen-and-ink drawings—in the traditional manner and then pulls it apart in search of the humans behind the pots. The book is heavy with facts, including three pages of neutron activation analysis values, ware types in ninety-five contexts, and an eight-page list of paintings illustrating contemporary pots. My favorite section is Diagram 8, line drawings summarizing the development of each ware—a very fine teaching tool. To my knowledge, however, the Westerwald-type chamber pot does not appear in the sixteenth century, as illustrated (80–88, 101–7, 184–91).
It must be noted that The Historical Archaeology of Pottery belongs to the British Archaeological Reports series. BARs contain information of exceptional importance for which there is little funding. The printing, on light paper bound within a soft cover, is one grade better than commercial copying. Purchasers unfamiliar with BARs will probably expect a higher standard of production. The only serious complaint is the lack of an index.
John Hurst sent me down to London to meet Gaimster in 1995, and that first encounter remains one of my favorite memories. Gaimster and I were deep in the bowels of the British Museum, in a vault lined with the treasures of the Empire, when he took issue with my rather precise dating of Westerwald. A verbal scuffle broke out, and he pounded me as if I were a clod off a turnip truck. I remember a wall of Montelupo chargers—the commedia dell’arte—spinning before my eyes as I sank to the floor. Lying there looking up at the bottoms of the tables, I was very aware of the mud between my toes, but that reminded me of the shipwrecks. A rolling lunge with the Batavia got me on my feet, and I followed up with the Vergulde Draeck.[14] Those were the secret words. Gaimster backed off, acknowledged that I might have a soul, and we moved on. Score another for the ladies in the Hopewell Public Library.
Taft Kiser, Cultural Resources, Inc.
Ivor Noël Hume, If These Pots Could Talk: Collecting 2,000 Years of British Household Pottery (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 2001), pp. 134–35.
Robert T. Kiser, “Standing Costrel,” Research Resources, Jamestown Ceramic Research Group: An Online Typology of 17th-Century Ceramics (Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, Jamestown Rediscovery, 1997), www.apva.org/resource/costrel.html (accessed June 16, 2008).
Jan Baart, Wiard Krook, Ab Lagerweij, Nina Ockers, Hans van Regteren Altena, Tuuk Stam, Henk Stoepker, Gerard Stouthart, and Monika van der Zwan, Opgravingen in Amsterdam: 20 jaar stadskernonderzoek (Amsterdam: Dienst Der Publieke Werken/Amsterdams Historisch Museum Afdeling Archeologie, 1977); Colin Platt and Richard Coleman-Smith, Excavations in Medieval Southhampton, 1953–1969 (Leicester, Eng.: Leicester University Press, 1975); Sarah Jennings with M. M. Karshner, W. F. Milligan, and S. V. Creasey, Eighteen Centuries of Pottery from Norwich, East Anglian Archaeology Report No. 13 (Norwich, Eng.: The Norwich Survey, 1981); John Allan, Medieval and Post-Medieval Finds from Exeter, 1971–1980, Exeter Archaeological Reports 3 (Exeter, Eng.: Exeter City Council and the University of Exeter, 1984); John G. Hurst, David S. Neal, and H.J.E. van Beuningen, Pottery Produced and Traded in North-west Europe, 1350–1650 (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, 1986).
Mary J. Galt, Archaeological Excavations at Jamestown, Virginia, Archaeological Research Series, no. 4, edited by John L. Cotter (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1958), pp. 222–24.
Edward B. Jelks, “Ceramics from Jamestown,” in ibid., pp. 201–4; C. Malcolm Watkins, North Devon Pottery and Its Export into America in the 17th Century, Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology, Paper 13 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1960). We now know that a few of Watkins’s pots actually were Donyatt, from Somerset. See Taft Kiser, “Seventeenth-Century Donyatt Pottery in the Chesapeake,” in Ceramics in America, edited by Robert Hunter (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 2001), pp. 220–22; Richard Coleman-Smith, Taft Kiser, and Michael Hughes, “Donyatt-Type Pottery in 17th- and 18th-Century Virginia and Maryland,” Post-Medieval Archaeology 39, pt. 2 (2005): 294–310.
Ivor Noël Hume, Guide to the Artifacts of Colonial America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969). The book’s appearance showed impeccable timing, as the approaching 1976 American bicentennial ignited a boom in archaeological work. Despite early jokes about “tin-can archaeology,” by 1974 every important Revolutionary War figure needed a historical archaeologist.
Ivor Noël Hume, Martin’s Hundred: A Firsthand Account of One of the Most Important Excavations in American Archaeology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982).
In reference to the triad of Hodges, Powell, and Kiser, Jim once said that we would never see the forest or the trees, but that we were getting a good grasp on the aphids.
Myra Stanbury, Batavia Catalog (Perth: Western Australia Museum, 1974).
David A. Harrison III had Sheetrocked a pig barn, painted it white, and given it to us as an archaeological lab. Noël Hume is very tall, about six and a half feet, and he stood beside a long table in the center of the room, with Audrey and Jim to the right. Jim wore his cowboy hat, of course, and he turned and waved me in. I handed Noël Hume a sherd and flashed a parallel in Steinzeug. He considered the illustration and said, “I see we are using the same books.” It was a moment of triumph. See Gisela Reineking von Bock, Steinzeug, Kataloge Kunstgewerbemuseum Köln 4 (Cologne, Germany: Kunstgewerbemuseum Köln, 1971).
Hurst et al., Pottery in North-west Europe.
Al Luckenbach and C. Jane Cox, “Tobacco-Pipe Manufacturing in Early Maryland: The Swan Cove Site (ca. 1660–1669),” in The Clay Tobacco-Pipe in Anne Arundel County, Maryland (1650–1730), edited by Al Luckenbach, C. Jane Cox, and John Kille (Annapolis, Md.: Anne Arundel County’s Lost Towns Project, 2002), pp. 46–63.
David R. M. Gaimster, German Stoneware, 1200–1900: Archaeology and Cultural History (London: British Museum Press, 1997).
Stanbury, Batavia Catalog; Jeremy Green, The AVOC Jacht Vergulde Draeck Wrecked off Western Australia, 1656, British Archaeological Reports, Supplementary Series 36 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 1977).