Beverly A. Straube
A “Wretched Tile” from Jamestown

The word went out among the staff to gather at the fort site. This is a standard ritual of the Jamestown Rediscovery project when something special is found in situ, and it is an event that happens often. The archaeologists are uncovering the artifacts and architecture of James Fort, the site of our nation’s beginnings four hundred years ago on the banks of the James River in Virginia. Now owned by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, the sponsor of the excavations, the site has yielded nearly one million artifacts that have led to the rewriting of Jamestown’s history.

The circle around the squatting archaeologist grew as the staff arrived one by one. The young man squinted up at us with a grin. “So what is it?” he asked, as he carefully brushed the object with his whisk broom. We could tell the object was a complete Dutch wall tile, but the tile was upside down so we could not see the motif on its face.

Lots of fragments of these tin-glazed earthenware tiles had been showing up during the recent excavations. We were working within the perimeter of James Fort’s palisade walls but we were uncovering evidence of a substantial building that had been built somewhere nearby, after the palisades had come down in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. This evidence included clay roofing and floor tiles as well as the decorative tin-glazed wall tiles from the Netherlands.

Speculation concerning the possible decoration on the tile face flew quickly among those gathered. All of the other recovered tile fragments had been of Dutch ladies and gentlemen in fancy dress, tradesmen and artisans wielding their crafts, and soldiers in various poses taken from the prints of Jacob de Gheyn.1

The archaeologist carefully used the tip of his trowel to separate the tile from the earth that had sheltered it for almost four hundred years and cautiously turned it over for all to see. Faces fell and there was a collective sigh of disappointment. No one had anticipated that our only complete tile in over three hundred tile fragments would be what the Dutch called a wrakke tegel, or “wretched tile” (fig. 1).2 On the face of it was a very blurry image of a man in a wide-brimmed hat holding a walking stick. The blurriness had occurred from overfiring in the glost kiln,3 which had caused the pigments of the design to flow. Tiles are fired standing upright on bats about 1/5 inches apart and supported by soft rolls of clay.4 The direction of the glaze flow on our tile reveals how it stood in the kiln.

“Wretched tiles” are seconds or thirds and they made up the majority of a Dutch tile workshop’s inventory—surprising, considering their infrequent appearance at archaeological sites. It is estimated that only 15 percent of fired tiles in the seventeenth century were graded first quality.5 According to Dutch delftware historian Dingeman Korf, “even if tiles had ‘run’ they were sometimes added to the batch that was to be delivered. This happened often with tiles of second class quality and so they did find a place on the wall.”6

The consumers at Jamestown were obviously somewhat discriminating. The reason the wretched tile is our only complete tile is because it was thrown out before it ever found “a place on the wall”!

Beverly A. Straube, Senior Curator, Jamestown Rediscovery, Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities; bly@apva.org