Lucas O’Neill
While excavating context 108 of OA11 on May 21st 2026, I noticed a strange metal piece sticking out of the wall of the northern wall of the pit. What made this piece of metal unique amongst the many pieces of scrap metal found in OA11 was the greenish colour and lack of rust. I simply slowly pulled out this piece of metal from the wall to reveal an entire intact fork that simply fell out of the wall.
While a cool find, nothing was originally thought of the dining ware, and it was simply placed in the artifact bag. That was until Kate looked at the fork (identifying it as possibly pewter) and pointed out a series of five (at the time of unreadable marks). The fork itself was a fiddle backed fork with a raised ‘dognose’ on the end. The markings quickly caught my interest and slowly led me down the rabbit hole of studying the hallmark system of metal stamping. This rabbit hole included far too much time over the course of days looking through databases and personal collections of silver and pewter items from Britian, Canada, and America.
For brief background context, the legally required British hallmark system was a series of 4 to 5 stamps placed onto valuable metals, as graded by an assay office. These marks give information on the grading office, quality of the metal, the date it was graded, and the initials of the smith who made it. What makes our identification difficult is that these regulations did NOT apply to Canadian smiths. This leaves us with the question of what metal our fork is made from? Kate’s original theory of pewter holds as a strong possibility, as pewtersmiths did attempt to mimic the hallmarks of British silver smiths and Pewter does slowly become green over time. The second option which I suggested was silver plated, as I had found a handful of examples of silver-plated forks with a similar second symbol to our fork (the “male” symbol). Due to other metals found even in sterling silver, silver also slowly oxidizes to green.
On May 27th, my last lab day, I found the cleaned and processed fork and photographed the cleaned-out hallmarks.
Using this photograph, we can finally establish our hallmarks; a c with a spike through the middle, the “male” symbol, and the gothic letters J E H. What is most interesting about these marks is the lack of any attempt at the sterling lion (the British symbol representing quality silver), this completely proved that the fork was not pure silver (and probably not plated silver). The mark that appears like a “male” symbol is an example of a pseudo hallmark, which is a mark with no legal meaning used by a smith or organization as a calling card of their work. The final three gothic letters were in all probability the initials of the smith (J.E.H.). Although I cannot currently find any noticeable smiths with these initials. This leaves us with the c, which I originally believed might have been a letter of the grade of metal quality [Kate — or it could be mimicking a letter date code often found on real sterling silver pieces].
Leave a comment