Throwing Pots in the Kitchen

          Archaeologists interested in historic trades can learn much by practicing traditional crafts. Prehistorians are likewise indebted to 'experimental archaeologists' who have long studied the processes, behaviors, and materials of activities like flint knapping, butchering, copper smelting, salt boiling, and so on. My own research into the archaeology of Virginia's early 19th-century potters has opened my eyes to the thousands of clues hidden in potsherds, kiln waste, and potting sites that are only accessible to those who have practiced the craft and can recognize how these artifacts were created.

          Before last year, I hadn't really tried to throw anything on the wheel since 7th or 8th grade. At that time, the whole concept was just beyond me. I remember having plenty of trouble getting the clay centered and then rarely (never?) surviving to make a shallow bowl. I think I produced one conical budvase/doorstop. As a result, I usually contented myself in middle school art classes with hand-building pieces like those below.

Early pottery- 5th and 7th grade or so

 

          Once or twice in college, I took a shot at throwing a bit of clay on an old record player I'd pulled the spindle out of. Although I managed a couple of tiny jars and even a little (3") ring bottle, centering the clay proved more a matter of chance than skill.

          Well, a few years into my dissertation on 19th-century potteries, I began thinking seriously about learning to throw and in the spring of 2012, I was given the parts of an old wheel  by a potter friend. The frame was long gone, the shaft and heavy kickwheel had actually spent the better part of a few decades at rest in the woods by his shop. A great piece of folk art in itself, the wheel began life as a flywheel on an early tractor. The broad steel rim that once carried a leather drive belt now served as the outer lip of a ring of cement. Cast between the rim and an inner brace of boards, the cement was inscribed "Luella's Own" and "Pat. Pending". Luella, it turned out, was the original owner. Her father had made the wheel for her and my friend had gotten it from them. That kickwheel became his first wheel and it served him well until he graduated to electric wheels. 

Above: my first thoughts on building a combination electric/kick wheel using an old Packard electric motor I found and bearings, blocks, and pulleys from the hardware store.

'Luella's Own' kickwheel in the frame I began building in my kitchen. The wheel is designed to have a wooden deck bolted over the cement for extra traction.

          Excited to get it home and set up, I started making plans and tried to plot how best to rig it for my apartment. As with most of my projects, I promptly got into a couple snags- first, that the shaft was too low to accommodate my legs and second, that said shaft was fused in the bearing blocks by rust. After much tapping, hammering, and spraying of penetrating oils, I surrendered and took it to a local garage to press out the shaft. While the shop was closed over a weekend, I happened to see another wheel listed on Craigslist. More or less of an impulse purchase in the wake of my frustrations with the rusty shaft, the big steel studio treadle wheel came home the next day. It is a Klopfenstein treadle from Ohio, still made until recently, but this one probably dates to the early 1950s. There was rust to deal with here as well, but a couple of days with a wire wheel, sandpaper, and tractor enamel brought it back up to par. I did have to replace the treadle rod so I got a new steel rod at the local hardware store and cut the needed threads with a die. Naturally, the garage called back that the shaft for wheel Nr. 1 was freed the same day.

The treadle wheel comes home.

Klopfenstein treadle wheel- cleaned up and ready to use.

           Well, progress on 'Luella' has been slow. I did throw a few pieces on it first while the frame was in mock-up stage but otherwise I've been using the treadle wheel. To be honest, in the year and a half since I began throwing, I haven't put in a month where I've practiced every day. Dissertation work and other projects got in the way- often quite literally as the two wheels became work surfaces and storage when not in use. Well, here's hoping that with the dissertation done I'll be able to make more time. 

          So, last spring and summer, I set out to teach myself how to throw. I had help of course- a number of books and some videos I'd made of demonstrations by potter friends Hal Pugh, Mary Farrell, and Michelle Erickson. I also got a lot of help watching online videos, particularly those of Simon Leach. 

Ring jug thrown as an open, circular trough and closed in. I'm trying to balance learning basic forms like cylinders with learning about historic pottery forms but like apprentices of old, I would probably be better served to spend a year throwing nothing but candlesticks or cylinders.

          Clay for my throwing came from the ceramic supply shop in Richmond, but also from the 19th-century potting sites I was studying for my dissertation. I learned to dry the clay, crush it, soak and 'slake' it, screening to remove the twigs, roots, rocks, and tiny fossils. Like learning to throw and using the manual wheels, I wanted to get closer to the old time potters by learning how to process my own materials. I still have a long way to go with this and am looking forward to learning how to make glazes especially the cobalt oxide and manganese slips common in salt-glazed stoneware.

          Within a month, I was much better at centering, controlling, and gaining a feel for the clay. After that my progress seemed to slow and I began getting distracted. New 'green' pots appeared on the shelves around the kitchen every few days, then only every few weeks. Often, it felt like I kept having the same troubles: thick bases and clay getting too wet and succumbing to cracking or slumping. Still, looking back, I have been able to throw larger balls of clay a little more confidently and I am sure more and steady practice with help. 

The green ware piles up, despite not spending enough time on the wheel. As a beginner, I have kept more than I should, but I hope to use these to test a home-built kiln.

Practicing making lids and jugs and making 'sprig' molds for decorations based on historic examples like the Bartmann masks at right.

Bottle, mug, various small vessels, and a ring jug based on a 17th-century French earthenware example

          About a year ago, I also picked up an old electric kiln in the hope of converting it to burn gas as I had seen done online. I bought a pair of propane weed burners and removed the electric coils but have yet to pick up firebricks to make a flue and interior chimney for the downdraft design I'm aiming for. I could simply burn the kiln as an updraft, I know, but I'm interested in experimenting with the draft/flue patterns.

Old electric kiln, above, and sketches for conversion to gas, below.

Some vintage potting tools including a bone rib.

Plaster wedging block built from an old coffee table. Left leg holds a cutting wire tightened with turnbuckles.

Roads in the Woods

Archaeology and Displaced Communities: Farmsteads

          Work this week finds us once again deep in the woods of eastern Virginia, picking through the remains of an old farmstead. Tumble-down chimneys and leaf-blanketed cellars of these lost farms dot neighboring ridges. Steps without churches adjoin abandoned cemeteries and graves are reduced to clustered depressions, their occupants disinterred seventy years hence.

There are many famous examples of people whose homes and communities have been suddenly erased in the name of progress: the reservoir towns of the TVA and the "hollows" of what became Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the African American community of Seneca Village enveloped by New York's Central Park and, as here, the hundreds of communities that vanished with the growth of American military bases.

Farmhouse site with cellar at upper center.

          Today's site is typical, a small farm built atop a ridge in the late 1800s. To reach it, we drive a tangle of gravel roads through fields and woods. The route is punctuated with firing ranges and mock battlefields strewn with forlorn target vehicles. This landscape of brutal utility alternates with one of broad fields and rolling tracts of woodland. True, forest and meadow alike are pocked by craters, blasts fired in preparation for Normandy and Hue, Desert Storm and Baghdad; but this tortured earth also explodes with beauty. A hundred species of wildflower rush to colonize the fresh soil. Animals abound as well amid this continual regeneration and deer and squirrel, groundhog, beaver, fox, turtle and many others make regular appearances. It is a strange environment and one far removed from that of the farming communities that existed here a few generations ago.

          Our farmstead lies along an old road hemmed in by sweet gum, oak, and poplar. The footprint of the house survives as a shallow, square cellar in a long rectangle of stone piers. A rocky mound to the east is all that remains of a fallen chimney. Behind the house, a square footing of field stone marks an outbuilding, perhaps a kitchen.  A cement-parged foundation to the east, probably a garage or shed, opens two bays toward the house.  Southwest across the road, a gaping hole marks a vanished ice house, once 15 feet square and as deep or more. The walls slump in now, making it seem twice the size, while a thick, soft bottom of leaf litter lends mysterious depth.  A few more rectangular depressions and the twisted wreckage of old, standing-seam metal roof are scattered nearby.

Here and there, the debris of daily life peaks up amid a lush growth of oak seedlings and fruiting paw paws: an enamel chamberpot, a brown and white gallon jug, a bottle, a scrap of shoe leather studded with copper tacks. This land was all in fields the last time the vanished door closed. It has grown up and been logged at least once since, judging by the trees and the ragged ravines eroded into the surrounding slopes. The house, on its rough stone piers, was of frame construction with wooden siding and tin roof. Lengths of semi-circular gutter, with twisted wire hangers and narrow downspouts still intact, crunch beneath the leaves around the ice-house and home.

          We parked our van in a little turnaround beside the road, just in front of the home site with its gnarled oak.  Massive of limb, it stood surly as the apple trees in The Wizard of Oz, as a coworker observed. We soon set about pulling a measuring tape trough the trees and brush, threading it along a path formed with the aid of machetes and compass. These baselines form the axes of a grid encompassing the site. Between these axes, we pace off fifteen-meter intervals. At each interval we mark the spot for a shovel test pit with a length of yellow tape. A 'shovel test' is more-or-less what it sounds like, a hole dug into the ground the width of the spade and as deep as needed to reach subsoil. 'Sub' is the sterile, geological level that predates Native and European presence. We shovel the soil from each into a shaker screen, and shake and sift with hands to reveal bits of everyday life. The screen is a simple wooden frame, 3 1/2 by 2 feet and four inches deep, with two handles at one end and a U-shaped leg of bent steel conduit that pivots on bolts at the other. Across the bottom, a piece of 1/4" wire mesh is stretched taught and anchored with batting or steel strips and screws.

          Our shovel tests here require two forms- one in detail for 'positives' and a very schematic one for 'negatives'. It has been the general rule on these base projects that several of the latter will fill up before one of the former feels the scratch of a pencil. The parcels we survey are large- in the hundreds of acres- and the likely human occupation sites, whether of 10,000 years ago or only 50, are comparatively scarce. Of course, we do recover military artifacts daily, sometimes by the pound, but as most do not meet the 50-year cut-off, they are generally noted and discarded. So, equipped with screen and shovel, a tarp to catch the dirt, and a bag of tools, we set off along the grid transects, plugging away at the landscape and hoping to sift out a sample of what came before.

Fragments of a 19th-century washstand pitcher with Rockingham glaze found just east of the house. 

          The shovel test pits (STPs) around the house prove, predictably, positive. They are not, however, as artifact-rich as might have expected. The innumerable flakes and scraps of rusted tin roof are accompanied by square cut nails and glinting window glass. The nails are mostly arrow straight, suggesting the wood around them burned away. Also, they are not as corroded as they often are, and may thus have been tempered in a fire. Someone finds a horseshoe, another turns up the base of a thick ironstone chamberpot. Traces of the farmer and family jostle into view amid bouncing clumps of dirt: a sherd of stoneware- made in the mid- to late-1800s, maybe in Richmond, maybe in West Virginia; a pair of scissors, their handles missing and blades locked in rust but still sharp; a horseshoe from a horse who habitually dragged its feet. While we extract these bits and pieces, our company historian is back in Williamsburg or in the state library library in Richmond, piecing together the paper trail of this property or one from a similar project- another family and another forgotten story.

          Each of the positive shovel tests is recorded in the form of a soil column, a cross-section sketch of the layers encountered. These layers, or "strata" are labeled by texture- generally some combination of loam, silt, sand, and or clay and a color according to a standard system- the Munsell book. This book, with its earthy hues like 7.5YR 4/3 Strong Brown or 10YR 6/6 Brownish Yellow, is a constant companion on surveys. It is our best hope of standardizing how multiple pairs of eyes see the ground. Each space also provides for a list of artifacts and any comments such as 'remains of fencepost 1m. to east' or 'look out- poison ivy!'.  While the diggers advance from hole to hole, the crew chief traverses the entire project parcel, mapping natural and man-made features, above-ground remains, and any other pertinent information using the numbered and lettered grid. Together, the shovel tests and the map help interpret how the land was used and how that use changed over time. And so, our farmstead, little more that a few piles of stone and a scatter of depressions to the first time observer, begins to come into focus.

A preliminary interpretation of the farmhouse footprint on the forest floor.

          The site is relatively late and it has been affected by logging and erosion, with considerable areas of soil lost. Features and artifacts may have been hopelessly blended or washed away by man and nature. This site may see limited 'evaluation'- generally a series of 1-meter square test units dug down in levels to barren clay sub in search of soil features and artifacts in chronological and spatial context. Farmsteads, many archaeologists will say, are a dime a dozen. Archaeological surveys, performing work in compliance with the Archaeological and Historical Preservation Act of 1974 are, of necessity, a science of sampling and statistical value. What we are unable to learn from one site, we may be able to from another. The larger a sample we manage to study before it is lost, however, the richer and more meaningful the final picture. One particular farm may not be the best preserved or the most informative, but it is the record of a real, individual family, someone's ancestors, and it can be used to parse out their, and by extension, our story.

We share the woods with both squirrels and squirrel hunters, so bright orange vests are the order of the day.

A Cecropia or giant silk moth caterpillar. The blue dots will grow into sharp spines and the red and yellow tubercles develop into dotted spheres resembling murano glass beads. Caterpillars have become an unexpected threat to our crew. Several coworkers have now been stung by the 'saddleback' variety whose bee-like sting lasts for a day or more.  Lucky so far!

The green, mango-shaped fruit of the paw paw (Asimina triloba) will soon ripen to a deep yellow/brown and taste like tangy, sweet custard.

An Introduction

  How can we live without our lives? 

How will we know it’s us without our past? 

- John Steinbeck 

          Our 'modern' world is formed literally and figuratively out of everything that came before us. We say we can never know the past as it truly was. In truth we are the past- the sum of a thousand generations of experience and knowledge. It is the 'present' that holds a tenuous claim to reality.

          What we recognize as the tangible past: documents, artifacts, and places, are here because they have survived the ravages of time. Sometimes they have done so through care, but more often through carelessness. They are not, in themselves, 'the past', but they are keys to understanding. Mere objects when seen individually, viewed in context their relations to one another and to us weave a fabric of experience both fascinating and priceless. In these pages, I trace my encounters with these objects through my archaeological work and expanding forays into the world of museums and historic preservation.

          Ranging from centuries-old pipe stems to books, and from structures to whole landscapes, these artifacts have survived, often by pure chance, to become the physical remnants of our story. It is our duty to learn through these precious resources as well as to protect them. They are our accidental heritage.