By the time of Dutch colonization in the 1620s, the land that became New York City had been occupied by Native Americans for 13,000 years. Located where land and water met, the area was rich in resources, especially migratory birds, fish, and shellfish. The region’s appeal for the Dutch was the fur trade with the Native Americans up the Hudson River near today’s Albany. They established New Amsterdam at the river’s mouth because of its natural port for transferring goods to oceangoing vessels and its strategic location for protecting the river from European competitors.
For the first few decades of the colony’s existence, New Amsterdam was a company town administered by the Dutch West India Company (dwic) and populated, for the most part, by its male employees (fig. 1).[1] But in the 1640s, after the removal of the DWIC monopoly on the fur trade and a lull in conflict with the Native Americans, more families settled there. European settlers came from many different countries, especially those around the Netherlands.[2] Africans were also part of the city from its founding when the first slaves were brought to New Amsterdam in the 1620s. New Amsterdam had become a settler colony and a slave society by 1664, when the English conquered it and renamed it New York.[3]
After the English conquest, New York continued in its role of entrepôt (fig. 2). As the fur trade waned, it was replaced with trade in locally produced agricultural goods, most of which went to the Caribbean islands to provision the slaves on the plantations there. The city grew as the West Indian trade and its supporting crafts and businesses, including retailers who sold imported English finished goods such as ceramics, became the backbone of its economy. “New York . . . lived by feeding the slaves who made the sugar that fed the [English] workers who made the clothes and other finished wares that New Yorkers didn’t make for themselves.”[4] Its demographics changed with an influx of immigrants from England, Scotland, and France, especially Huguenots after 1685, and, after about 1710, Germany. Nevertheless, the labor force increasingly was made up of enslaved Africans.[5]
On the eve of the American Revolution, many New Yorkers were economically dependent on international trade and loyal to the crown. The city suffered during the Revolutionary War; under British occupation from 1776 to 1783 there were several ruinous fires that destroyed much of New York’s infrastructure and trade was severely curtailed.
Trade and prosperity picked up after the war. Having been fourth in port activity, New York jumped to first place in the 1790s, although there were setbacks, particularly Jefferson’s Embargo and the War of 1812. After the war ended in 1815, peace restored prosperity as British merchants sent mass shipments of goods, including ceramics, to New York. Some goods went directly to merchants but many were sold by auctioneers. In 1817 the state legislature authorized the building of the Erie Canal, which transformed trade by funneling resources from the Midwest to New York instead of other coastal cities. Immigration from Europe increased exponentially, initially mostly from Ireland and Germany and then southern and eastern Europe, along with other parts of the United States.[6] With population growth came changes in the city’s social geography (fig. 3). Whereas in the eighteenth century, employers and slave owners lived under one roof with their employees and captives in neighborhoods that were relatively heterogeneous by economic class, in the nineteenth century they moved away from their workplaces and workers, and established residential enclaves that were quite homogenous by class. The enslaved, who were finally emancipated in New York in 1827, and other workers established their own neighborhoods, and the face of the city was irrevocably changed.
In spite of the fact that Manhattan Island is one of the most intensively occupied spaces in the world, archaeological remains can be found under existing buildings and streets, especially where wetlands, shorelines, and low-lying ground have been filled in.[7] The first archaeologists to work in the city, at the turn of the twentieth century, searched the water’s edge for Native American sites and scoured undeveloped upland areas for Revolutionary War artifacts. The most intensive period for urban archaeology in the city began during the building boom of the late 1970s, when city, state, and federal laws first required developers to conduct environmental studies, which included archaeology (fig. 4).[8] This period lasted until the early 1990s, although projects continue today.[9]
The Native American Presence
When Native Americans first arrived in the area after the retreat of the last glaciers, sea levels were much lower, and the Atlantic shore was 24 to 60 miles to the east of what is now New York City. As sea levels rose, the area became very rich in marine, estuarine, and riverine resources of fish, shellfish, and sea mammals, as well as migratory birds.
The richness of the environment precluded a major reliance on agriculture, unlike other areas of Native populations.[10] But like other groups, the local people adopted pottery making more than 2,000 years ago, an innovation that had a profound effect on Native lifeways. In the early twentieth century, avocational archaeologists Reginald Bolton and William Calver discovered a nearly complete jar from the Late Woodland period (A.D. 900–1600) at approximately 214th Street east of Tenth Avenue, the Inwood area of upper Manhattan (figs. 5, 6).[11] Avocational archaeologists have contributed much of what we know about New York’s archaeological past. Their work was particularly important in the early twentieth century, when the city was being developed at an alarming rate and many of its archaeological sites were destroyed.[12]
Dutch Cooking Pots
Three-legged cooking pots with one or two distinctively shaped ear handles are the most common coarse earthenware vessels found on North American seventeenth-century sites where the Dutch established colonies or traded extensively.[13] Earthenware cooking pots were used to prepare many types of foods, especially grain gruels or porridges, or soups and stews. Grain gruels were an important part of seventeenth-century Dutch foodways, and Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam added Native American “sapaen,” or cornmeal porridge, to their diets as a substitute for wheat or barley gruels.[14] Although government and laws changed when New Amsterdam became New York under the English, foodways did not.[15]
In archaeological examples and contemporary genre paintings, most cook pots are made of red earthenware, but some are made of buff or white clay (fig. 7). Lead glaze, which appears yellow on the buff-bodied pots, covers the interior and about two-thirds of the exterior. Red pots sometimes have white slip under a green glaze on the interior and sometimes are decorated with trailed slip motifs on the exterior.[16]
Two cooking pots excavated from a mid-1690s deposit at the 7 Hanover Square site in lower Manhattan are evidence that Dutch ceramics, and by extension Dutch foodways, were in use more than a generation after the English takeover (fig. 8).[17] The buff-bodied pot was almost certainly imported from the Netherlands, but the red-bodied vessel might have been made in New York, a possibility to be explored using various material science analyses.[18]
Africans in New Amsterdam—Delft Plate
The first enslaved Africans were brought to New Amsterdam in 1625 or 1626 by the Dutch West India Company, but their presence has tended to be excluded from traditional histories (fig. 9). Recently, however, archaeologists have been looking for traces of African presence in excavations and collections.[19] In 1984, archaeologists digging at the Broad Financial Center site in the heart of what had been New Amsterdam uncovered the lower portion of a barrel containing a cache of objects, including half of a faience plate, an assortment of stoneware marbles, a large iron key, iron nails, tobacco pipe fragments, several other sherds, and wampum (fig. 10).[20] The plate was made by Haarlem potter Gerrit Verstraeten and dates to the mid-seventeenth century, dating the feature to that period (fig. 11).[21] The pattern was derived from a Chinese porcelain style transitional from the Ming to Qing dynasties.
A visiting Dutch avocational archaeologist identified the barrel—which had holes punched through its base—as a drain, a common seventeenth-century feature in the Netherlands. But what about the objects in it? Were they items that had simply randomly accumulated in the drain?
Based on discoveries made at later African-American sites in the South, the value of some of the objects in a distant frontier outpost like New Amsterdam, and contemporary religious practices in western Africa, it is likely that the barrel and its contents constituted something very different: a spirit cache created by an African. Slaves might have ritually used objects that were new to them—European ones—but which had traditional values or characteristics, such as the color white or material such as iron.[22]
Drinking at the King’s House Tavern
Taverns were extremely important in social, political, and economic life in the Dutch and English American colonies (fig. 12). They were the only large buildings in which groups of people could gather for secular purposes; they socialized, heard the news, conducted trade deals, discussed political issues, flirted, and, of course, drank. Excavations at the Stadt Huys Block at 85 Broad Street in lower Manhattan uncovered the foundation wall and basement deposits from the King’s House Tavern, which was built in 1670, used as a temporary City Hall when the Stadt Huys next door was declared unsafe, and burned in 1706.[23] When the tavern was demolished, the broken glass bottles, white clay smoking pipes, and drinking vessels wound up in the basement. Among the archaeological fill, five nearly identical red earthenware jugs were retrieved (fig. 13).[24]
The five jugs were almost certainly made by the same local potter, who copied a stoneware or tin-glazed form.[25] These are noteworthy examples of early American-made ceramics, but they exhibit characteristics of less-than-perfect domestic production. Two of the jugs have thick glaze and kiln-pad adhesions on their bases that make them rather unsteady. They have different colored glazes, due in part to varying firing conditions within the wood-fired kiln, although the green, copper oxide glaze of one shows that at least two different glaze formulas were used.
The capacity of the jugs varies from approximately 3 2/3 cups to 4 1/4 cups. Wine and beer usually were shipped and stored in barrels and tapped as needed. Perhaps patrons who were in the know would ask for their drink to be served in the green earthenware jug rather than the light brown one because it held a little more.
Eighteenth-Century Stonewares
Ceramic historians know the names of Crolius and Remmey as the two most famous potting families in North American salt-glazed stoneware manufacture. Their New York City potteries, located just north of the Common (now the site of City Hall), began operation in the 1720s.[26] The nineteenth-century vessels made by these interrelated families are well known because many were marked or decorated with distinctive motifs, but the families’ earlier products are known mainly from archaeological excavations of waster dumps uncovered at sites near the potteries.[27] In the eighteenth century the potters worked together with their families and apprentices to make vessels that imitated tin-glazed and white salt-glazed forms in an effort to capture part of the growing market for ceramics. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, however, the market for salt-glazed stoneware vessels narrowed, and potters concentrated on making jars, jugs, and chamber pots.[28]
The remarkable New York–made barber’s bowl in figure 14 has a distinctive cutout and rather crude versions of painted motifs—a pair of scissors, a straight razor, and a brush or powder puff—frequently seen on tin-glazed examples.[29] Although the base is missing, the Manhattan potters were copying a common tin-glazed form with a deep base, like the example seen in figure 15. Other bowl-shaped vessels with decorated everted rims were likely made as washbasins, based on their resemblance to tin-glazed examples.[30] Fragments of at least a dozen washbasins, all with slightly different painted rim motifs but essentially identical forms, were found in the City Hall Park waster deposit.
The Revolution in New York City
Before the war, some citizens were enthusiastic about the pro-colonial policies of William Pitt (the Elder),[31] as witnessed by the “Patriotick Barber” cartoon (see fig. 15) and a punch bowl with “Pitt and Liberty” (fig. 16).[32] Many people in the city retained their patriotic stance after war broke out. When Washington and his troops were forced to evacuate the city in late 1776, however, the British made it their headquarters and did not leave until 1783.[33] Patriots left their homes and businesses in the city while Loyalists from other colonies flocked here for the protection of the Crown.[34] Some officers were quartered in the abandoned homes of patriots; others, along with enlisted men, had quarters in the barracks on the Common.[35]
Recent archaeological excavations on the site of the barracks have uncovered artifacts from a midden associated with the British occupation, including a “chintz” painted creamware teapot, an ebullient style of decoration rarely found on archaeological sites in America (fig. 17).[36] It was probably part of the outfit of an officer, for his personal use. Based on its shape and decoration, the teapot might have been made at the factory of William Greatbatch in Staffordshire, or the Leeds pottery in Yorkshire. Ceramic historians have attributed this style of decoration to the London shop of David Rhodes, but it was copied by other enamelers who worked on site at potteries in both Staffordshire and Yorkshire.[37]
Landfill and a Ceramic Dump
Real estate has always been important in New York’s economy, and throughout its history land has been created by landfilling to increase space at the city’s center. The first large-scale landfill occurred in the early 1690s along the East River. Landfilling continued there into the early nineteenth century, eventually adding three blocks to the city’s east side (fig. 18).[38] Landfilling along the west side began in the early nineteenth century and continued into the late twentieth century with the construction of Battery Park City into the Hudson. To make land during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, large wooden frames were built at the water’s edge, floated out, and sunk, enclosing an area that was then filled with earth (from leveling nearby hills or digging basements) and garbage. Refuse of all sorts was a large part of landfill until the early nineteenth century, when health considerations ended the practice. The refuse in landfill is a bonanza for archaeologists.[39]
The pearlware painted and small bowls illustrated in figure 19 are part of a ceramic dump assemblage found in landfill in Whitehall Slip.[40] In this particular assemblage, there were at least fifteen small bowls, two saucers, and one teacup with this tulip pattern.[41] They were probably part of a shipment of ceramics damaged during its transatlantic voyage; ceramics and other goods were often auctioned off directly at or near the docks, and it would have been convenient to dump damaged goods into the nearby landfill.[42] Like the contents of a shipwreck, this dump provides a unique snapshot of ceramics imported at one moment in time.
Commerce and Ceramics
Commerce has always been central to New York City’s existence. Although ceramics were but a small part of that trade, dishes from different parts of the world have been found in commercial and domestic archaeological contexts throughout all periods of the city’s history. The majority came from Great Britain, but porcelain from China was also popular.
Unlike Philadelphia and Boston, New York did not have a thriving local earthenware industry for much of the eighteenth century.[43] As a result, British-made slip-decorated coarse earthenwares are relatively more common in colonial archaeological assemblages there.[44]
Before the Revolutionary War, Chinese porcelain came to America through British merchants. After the war ended, American merchants made haste to establish their own trade relationships with Chinese merchants.[45] The teabowl shown in figure 20, with the motif of two lovebirds on a bar, was found in a large domestic deposit associated with the Bowne family.[46]
New Yorkers continued to prefer imported British ceramics to American-made ones well into the nineteenth century. The ca. 1842–1855 Staffordshire-made teapot illustrated in figure 21 was found at Seneca Village, an African-American and Irish immigrant community located in today’s Central Park. This elegant vessel was found in association with African-American homes and belies the denigrating stereotypical descriptions of black New Yorkers published in contemporary newspapers.
The Domestic Revolution
Before the mid-nineteenth century, middle-class white women in New York continued to follow the lead of their British cousins and chose transfer-printed dishes for setting their tables. But in the 1840s they broke away from this British tradition and began to use plain white plates in paneled Gothic-style patterns for family meals, and fancy porcelain cups for entertaining their friends.[47] The ecclesiastical associations of the Gothic style perhaps underlined women’s role as the moral guardians of society, while the fancier teawares enhanced their role of negotiating their family’s position in the social structure.[48] American women used the decorative arts to express a new identity, distinct from the older colonial identity that had tied the British colonies to the mother country. It wasn’t until five decades after independence that American women began to stop regarding English women as the arbiters of taste for fashions in the decorative arts, a phenomenon common among former colonists after achieving independence.[49]
The archaeologically recovered ceramics illustrated in the figures shown here come from a privy associated with the Robson family living on fashionable Washington Square.[50] The blue-on-white cup and saucer (fig. 22) and Willow-patterned plate (fig. 23) come from a lower deposit, dating to the 1840s, while the Gothic-style plate (fig. 24) and Italianate-style cup and saucer (fig. 25) come from an upper layer, deposited in the 1850s. The porcelain cup and saucer are unmarked and could have been made in either Europe (probably France) or the United States.[51]
Irish Immigration
The nineteenth century saw an unprecedented influx of immigrants to New York City, contributing to an increase in population from 33,000 in 1790 to 1.5 million in 1890. For much of those 100 years, the Irish constituted the largest group of immigrants, a position ceded to the Germans only later in the century.[52]
In the early 1990s, archaeologists excavated in the old Five Points district (fig. 26), the city’s most notorious slum. They uncovered a privy associated with a tenement occupied by Irish immigrants throughout the mid- to late nineteenth century, and discovered a host of domestic and other materials. The ceramics included transfer-printed teawares in a variety of patterns and plates with the blue Willow pattern as well as white granite in the Gothic style—both common in contemporary middle-class homes.[53]
The printed teawares included a “Father Mathew Temperance” cup (fig. 27). Father Mathew (1790–1856) was a temperance leader in Ireland whose goal was to rid the poor of intemperance so they could improve themselves spiritually, emotionally, and physically. A local priest invited Father Mathew to preach at Five Points when he was traveling in the United States, but it is not known whether he accepted the invitation.[54] The cup’s meaning in the tenement home is ambiguous. Was its role to inculcate temperance among household members and their guests, or was it to flaunt temperance? Did someone sip their whiskey from it? In the twenty-first century its importance assumed a new meaning, as one of the few artifacts from the collection to survive the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.[55]
