A brief but very intense storm rushed through at the end of the day yesterday, and the high winds mangled our sun canopy tents. The first order of business while we unloaded the trailer was to try and duct tape and bend the metal frames back so they could be somewhat useful still. Because of the heavy rain, site was extremely muddy this morning, we all got an extra workout from the inches of mud sticking to the bottom of our boots. The Raccoons and the Earthworms worked on excavating, while the Rats worked on finishing up their survey exercises.
It was a really pleasant day, and the excavation crews moved a lot of earth! We were able to determine via strategic sondage units that because of some fill brought in at some point, the current ground surface is a good 15cm or so higher than when we left the site in 2023. So this means we can shovel through the overburden a little more expediently and hopefully get down to the cultural layers that interest us more quickly. We relocated an old feature from our previous excavation which is helping us to home in on the rubble pile. We will be moving the operation area a bit more south to capture it and maybe finally satisfying our questions! The midden area is still a bit of a mystery, but by taking it down a little deeper we should have a better idea what is going on there tomorrow.
Here are some photos from the day:
Our artifact of the day came from what we think is nearby to a midden area of the site. It’s a clay pipe bowl, with the initials TD impressed into the clay while it was still wet before firing. We’ve covered clay pipes before, but let’s explore TD pipes in a little more detail.
While smoking is a cultural practice that is on the decline now that we know about its various negative health effects, men, women, and children all enjoyed the soothing properties and sweet taste of tobacco by smoking it in mass-produced white clay pipes. Fancy pipes would have been made one at a time, carved by craftsmen out of meerschaum or brier wood, but clay pipes allowed mass manufacture and distribution of cheap and cheerful pipes that would be purchased one or two at a time and discarded after a couple uses.
The mysteries surrounding the initials “TD” on pipes have been of interest to many people over the years, and one of the first published articles attempting to address the mystery was written by Alfred Hopkins in the November 1937 printing of Antiques magazine. Hopkins ambitiously tried to ascribe the TD to the first words of the c. AD 500 hymn “Te Deum” (Te Deum laudamus), but also proposed it might represent a trademark to identify a quality product. At the time this article was written, no sources had been found to suggest potential candidates for pipe makers with the initials TD. Once historical records became more accessible, including through digitisation, we are able to trace the TD pipe in a little more detail and propose a vector for their creation and popularity explosion.
Current scholarship suggests that TD pipes were first made by Thomas Dormer, Sr., who was a pipe maker in London. The interesting link here is that the Dormer pipeworks had various agreements with the Hudson’s Bay Company to sell pipes between 1748-1770. HBC records also mention that Dormer went into business with his son Thomas Jr. for a brief time from 1754-1756, ending with the senior Dormer’s death. Thomas Jr. continued on with exporting pipes to North America until his death in 1771. By selling through the vast distribution networks of the Hudson’s Bay Company, TD pipes became a familiar sight in North America. The TD mark was plagiarised after Thomas Dormer Jr.’s death, reproduced in likely hundreds of styles by makers in England, Scotland, Holland, Germany, and Canada throughout the mid-eighteenth century all the way to the 20th century. This extreme popularity of the TD mark led to these types of pipes becoming genericised, similar to how Kleenex is often used as a term for any brand of tissue, and the name Q-tip instead of cotton swabs.
While some of the TD marks pipes look quite fancy, with the TD located in a cartouche or decorated with stars or foliage, our pipe bowl is very plain, which suggests it comes from the last half of the 19th century. I guess this is probably a Bannerman or a Henderson pipe, but that is a hunch from seeing similar impressed serif TDs on pipes from these manufacturers. Since we don’t have the part of the pipe with the maker’s mark, it will remain a mystery to us!
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