Kira Brown
One of the most common artifact material types we’ve found during the Nassau Mills Project is ceramics. Like home decor styles and fashionable silhouettes, popular designs for ceramics come in trends. Ceramic decoration also tends to follow the aesthetic movement of the day. For example, the highly popular Chinese-inspired Blue Willow plate pattern gained popularity alongside other chinoiserie-style ceramic designs, art pieces, music, and literature. Because of changing trends, designs can be approximately dated to certain periods of manufacture, which can help narrow down the time period of other artifacts in the same context.
Some simpler kinds of decoration can also give clues about when a piece was produced. Edge ware is a common type of ceramic decoration for dishware, where plain dishes are decorated along their edges with either small incisions or brushstrokes and then painted over, often in a bright cobalt blue. While at a glance edge ware pieces may appear very similar, close examination can reveal subtle differences that can often date when a plate was made, down to a few decades. Painted, non-incised edge ware in cobalt blue was one of the most common ceramic motifs found during the project, and the style’s popularity during the latter half of the 19th century lines up well with when the house is believed to have been inhabited.
In some of our later artifacts, we can see how other materials, like bakelite, began replacing ceramic as a material in some objects. Bakelite is a hard plastic that became common in commercial products starting in the late 1920s, and peaked in popularity during the 1930s. The heat-resistant and decorative properties of bakelite made it a common alternative to ceramic and glass. Tobacco pipes, for instance, were one of the frequently found ceramic artifacts on our site. Although in earlier contexts pipe pieces were all ceramic, later tobacco pipes replaced ceramic mouthpieces with bakelite ones.
Many of the household objects that were once made of ceramic are now made of cheaper materials like plastic, or have fallen out of common use like chamber pots and washbasins; but ceramics still have their place, especially in the kitchen. If an archaeologist 150 years from now looked through your household ceramics, what conclusions could they draw about you or the life you lived? Are most of your ceramics durable stoneware for practical, everyday use, or do you have a collection of fancy bone china to impress guests? Do you use plain, unglazed terracotta for your flowerpots or do you prefer glazed pots in trendy styles? Before participating in field school, I may not have thought much about the story my ceramics tell, but nothing will make you think harder about your own ceramics than sorting through hundreds of pieces of someone else’s!
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