The Importance of British Material Culture to Historical Archaeologies of the Nineteenth Century
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The Importance of British Material Culture to Historical Archaeologies of the Nineteenth Century
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Overview
The Importance of British Material Culture to Historical Archaeologies of the Nineteenth Century helps fill these gaps, through case studies demonstrating the importance and meaning of mass-produced material culture in Britain from the birth of the Industrial Revolution (mid-1700s) to early World War II. By examining many disparate items—such as ceramics made for export, various goods related to food culture, Scottish land documents, and artifacts of death—these studies enrich both an understanding of Britain itself and the many places it influenced during the height of its international power.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803285316 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2016 |
| Series: | Society for Historical Archaeology Series in Material Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Alasdair Brooks is a heritage consultant in the United Kingdom and the editor of the journal Post-Medieval Archaeology and of Society for Historical Archaeology Newsletter. He is the author of An Archaeological Guide to British Ceramics in Australia, 1788–1901.
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The Importance of British Material Culture to Historical Archaeologies of the Nineteenth Century
By Alasdair Brooks
University of Nebraska Press and Society for Historical Archaeology
Copyright © 2015 Society for Historical ArchaeologyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8531-6
CHAPTER 1
At the Center of the Web
Later Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Ceramics from Huntingdon Town Centre in an International Context
Alasdair Brooks, Aileen Connor, and Rachel Clarke
British ceramics are some of the most common artifacts found on archaeological sites of the later 18th and 19th centuries, and have rightly been the subject of considerable archaeological attention internationally. Yet as is true with 19th-century British material culture more generally, far more interpretive work has taken place on these ceramics outside of the United Kingdom than inside it. As discussed in more detail in the introduction to the present volume, this lack of British work on British material culture of the period provides challenges for both British and non-British archaeologists. The present chapter builds on many of the observations from the introduction to look at the implications of a British-centered, globally aware analysis of domestic ceramics assemblages for the interpretation of those assemblages both in Britain and internationally. This in turn sets the underlying framework for the assumed international utility of the subsequent case studies, regardless of whether they are explicitly international in perspective or not.
An assemblage from the center of the small regional town of Huntingdon, in the east of England, provides the core data for this chapter's discussion. The primary focus is the analysis of decorative techniques on the post-1750 refined whitebodied earthenwares (creamware, pearlware, and whiteware) recovered from Huntingdon, as decoration has been a core area of much past international work. Of particular relevance here are past studies that address the apparent American preference for "lightly decorated" wares such as white granite from the mid-19th century (Ewins 1997; Miller and Earls 2008) and the hypothesis of a British Empire preference for "brightly colored" wares, as originally formulated by Lawrence (2003:25–26) and since discussed in other work (Klose and Malan 2000; Brooks 2005:56; Lucas 2006:105).
Huntingdon is a small market town in the east of England. Prior to 1974, it was the capital of the county of Huntingdonshire, but the county was then merged into modern Cambridgeshire. Huntingdon's postmedieval history is, from an international perspective, largely unremarkable. Its chief claim to historical prominence stems from being the birthplace of Oliver Cromwell (in 1599), and Cromwell would later also briefly serve as the town's member of Parliament (Cannon 1997:499). Several centuries later, it would provide the parliamentary constituency of the late 20th-century (though London-born) British Prime Minister John Major.
Huntingdon (Map 1) was not, and is not, a large town; its population in the 2001 census was slightly under 20,000, and the county of which it served as capital until 1974 was not only largely rural, but was also the third smallest in area in England. The short article on Huntingdonshire in the Oxford Companion to British History notes that the existence of several other flourishing county market towns of similar size (such as St. Ives and St. Neots) likely inhibited the growth of the county seat (Cannon 1997:499). Yet this general lack of remarkability, either in history or size, is part of the Huntingdon assemblage's appeal for the present study; the site was excavated as part of a commercial rescue archaeology project, not as part of a research project designed to study a unique or somehow unusual site associated with some form of marginalized community. While all sites are by necessity unique in some manner, this one is perhaps more mundanely quotidian than many British archaeological studies of the 19th century that focus on the study of specific social or ethnic groups.
The Fieldwork
Huntingdon town center has been the subject of extensive archaeological work undertaken by the Cambridge-based commercial archaeology firm Oxford Archaeology East (OA East), the east of England division of one of the largest commercial firms in Western Europe. Work in the first decade of the 21st century included at least six sites in the town center, many of them multi-period, which have been the subject of varying types of archaeological investigation (Clarke 2004, 2005, 2008a, 2008b; Kenney 2006; Mortimer 2006; Punchard 2008; Thatcher 2008). This fieldwork will form the basis for a forthcoming multi-period synthesis of the archaeology of Huntingdon Town Centre, studying the processes of change and development undergone by Huntingdon from the Late Saxon to the later postmedieval period (Clarke et al. 2009:5–6).
The current chapter focuses on data produced by just one of those excavations, fieldwork undertaken at the HUN TCR 07 site in Huntingdon town center in 2007 to 2008 (Clarke 2008b). This excavation at the town center produced a rare British example of a fully analyzed Georgian and Victorian ceramics assemblage from a smaller urban center. While some work has taken place in Chester (Matthews 1999), Cambridge (Cessford 2009:313–317), and York (Hunter-Mann 2008), most British urban work for the period has tended to focus on London and larger industrial cities (Guillery 2006; McNeil 2006; Jeffries et al. 2009; see also Jarrett et al. and Crook, this volume). Even within the context of British multi-period urban centers, the inland towns of the east of England, of which Huntingdon is an example, "remain barely sampled" (Ayers 2000:28). In addition to providing an important opportunity for internationally aware research — as in the present chapter — the ongoing analysis of the Huntingdon ceramics assemblage will more generally help to fill an important gap in the current British archaeological knowledge base for the material culture of the Georgian and Victorian periods.
Postmedieval Ceramics from Huntingdon
In the absence of single set of standard British guidelines for the description and analysis of post-1700 ceramics, the quantification methods, ceramic typologies, and dates used in this chapter were largely taken from An Archaeological Guide to British Ceramics in Australia (Brooks 2005) — which itself draws on American and British research — supplemented where necessary by Miller's important (though North America-centered) synthesis of terminology and dates for post-1500 artifacts (Miller 2000) and Godden's encyclopedia of pottery marks (Godden 1991).
1,016 fragments of pottery were recovered from postmedieval contexts in the Huntingdon Town Centre excavations, generating a minimum of 360 vessels postdating 1500. The contexts from which the postmedieval ceramics were recovered can be broken down into four main periods, one of which can be further broken down into two subperiods. These periods overlap, and while they are highly meaningful for site interpretation, they should not be considered formal ceramics "phases" as often used in the British analysis of pottery. They reflect both site-specific changes in site occupation and general developments in ceramic technology over the postmedieval period. The four periods are: pre-1700; ca. 1700–1780; ca. 1750–1840; and ca. 1840–1900. The third of these can be subdivided into a ca. 1750–1830 period and a ca. 1800–1840 period. It is acknowledged that these periods are fairly broad for ceramics assemblages; as such, they should be considered reflective of general trends in Huntingdon town center over time rather than discrete assemblages associated with specific households.
The following periodized vessel counts do not add up to the total site minimum vessel count of 360 as a small number of vessels of undiagnostic date from contexts with no other datable materials were excluded. The earliest period, roughly the 16th century through to the beginning of the 18th century, is represented by only 15 vessels recovered from only 3 contexts. It seems likely that this relative absence is tied to the known long period of decline in Huntingdon between the medieval and Georgian periods. None of Oxford Archaeology East's recent excavations have revealed much in the way of urban activity in the town center for the period ca. 1450–1650, and Huntingdon appears to have gone into a period of protracted decline from the arrival of the Black Death in the mid-14th century to a post–Civil War revival (Clarke et al. 2009:4). This earliest period is excluded from discussion in the present chapter, though it will be fully considered in forthcoming publications.
The 1700–1780 period contains 55 vessels (Table 1); while much of this period predates the primary focus of the present volume, it does help to demonstrate transitions in ceramics consumption in Huntingdon. These ceramics are largely characterized by tinglaze wares and miscellaneous postmedieval coarse red earthenwares, with relatively small amounts of the emerging mass-produced wares of the mid-18th century. The presence of white saltglazed stonewares and creamware, but total absence of pearlware, demonstrates that the contexts from this period are clearly 18th century but predate the large-scale introduction of pearlwares in ca. 1780.
The 1750–1840 period contains 146 vessels; 89 of these were recovered from the 1750–1830 subperiod (Table 2), and the remaining 57 were recovered from the 1800–1840 subperiod (Table 3). This is the first period that lies entirely within this volume's purview. It encompasses important developments in the history of industrial ceramics production, from the introduction of mass-produced refined whitebodied earthenware in the form of the cream-tinted materials usually referred to archaeologically as creamware, to the development of the blue-tinted glaze associated with pearlware, and on to the replacement of the latter two largely contemporaneous ware types with fully whitebodied "whiteware." Note that the latter evolution was not as clear-cut as some of the archaeological literature's confident placement of dates, particularly an 1820 start date for whiteware, might suggest. Whiteware did not suddenly replace creamware and pearlware. Instead potters gradually lessened the cream and blue tints in the glazes of the latter in the first decades of the 19th century until a true "white" ware was developed (Miller 1991:5). This can often make it difficult to distinguish between ware types, particularly between ca. 1820 and ca. 1830 when tinted and clear glazes coexist. Indeed, it has been argued by several specialists that traditional typologies based on ware type can be less useful for this time period than typologies based largely on decoration (Majewski and O'Brien 1987:135; Majewski and Schiffer 2001:34–42). Potters in the 19th century continued to generically describe all of these ware types as "CC ware" ("cream-colored ware") regardless of the actual color of the glaze (Miller and Earls 2008:71).
While whiteware therefore became common from ca. 1820, wares that are recognizably creamware and pearlware continued to exist until at least ca. 1830. This allows for the separation of the ca. 1750–ca. 1840 period at Huntingdon into two closely related subperiods. Nine of the seventeen contexts from this period contain some whiteware, indicating occupation into the early 19th century, but the majority of the refined whitebodied earthenwares (and about 40% of the total assemblage) are creamware and pearlware. Additionally, they contain small quantities of 18th-century ceramics that predate or overlap with the latter two types. It seems likely that these nine contexts do not date after the end of the 1820–1830 transition described in the previous paragraph, and dates of ca. 1750–1830 are used for this subperiod. Eight of the seventeen contexts in the overall 1750–1840 period, however, are characterized by relatively large quantities of early (pre-1850) transfer-printed whitewares — about a third of all of the ceramics in the subperiod — and nothing that definitely predates 1800. While there is clearly significant date overlap between these two groups of contexts, the first group would appear to straddle the turn of the century, while the second is almost entirely early 19th century in date. It is therefore significant that ongoing site research has subsequently shown that a baker called Robert Taylor lived at the site from 1801 to ca. 1844; these date ranges closely match the second ca. 1800–1840 subperiod, which would therefore appear to be associated with Taylor. The materials from the ca. 1750–1830 subperiod may also be associated with Taylor, or perhaps his currently unknown immediate predecessor, or perhaps both Taylor and his predecessor; a more precise association is impossible as of this writing.
The post-1840 period contains 137 vessels (Table 4). The period consists of five contexts clearly associated with the Victorian sites of Dilley's Yard and Gazeley House. These five contexts contain nearly 30% of the total site pottery by sherd count. Dilley's Yard was a small terrace of Victorian workshops and accommodation located just off Huntingdon Town Centre — in essence Huntingdon's one-street Victorian working-class city center "slum." As an example of a Victorian slum, neither the specific site nor its broader urban context is on the scale encountered by some prominent international work on 19th-century slums, such as Casselden Place in Melbourne (Murray and Mayne 2003) or Five Points in New York (Yamin 2001), and the present discussion therefore avoids direct comparison with this type of larger urban site.
While three of the five contexts from this period are clearly spatially associated with Dilley's Yard, the remaining two are on the border of the Dilley's Yard area and the garden of Gazeley House, a prominent early 19th-century Georgian townhouse. It may never be possible to prove whether these two contexts are directly associated with either the Yard or the garden as there is little to distinguish the ceramics. As such, all five post-1840 contexts are considered as a group here.
Ceramics Decoration
Tables 1 through 4 provide cross-referenced vessel counts by ware type, decoration (where relevant), and vessel form — and includes both counts and percentages — for each of the post-1700 periods (with period three divided into its two subperiods). While the ware and form distributions no doubt have their research value, both in terms of the development of material culture use in Huntingdon and for international comparative studies, it is the decorations that form the focus of the present chapter. The most important periods here are the ca. 1750–1840 period at least partially associated with the baker Robert Taylor, and the post-1840 period most closely associated with Dilley's Yard. This focus is partially a by-product of the increase in decorative variety on refined whitebodied ceramics from the mid-18th century onward; this makes it particularly productive to track and list decorative distributions for refined whitebodied earthenwares after ca. 1750. From the perspective of international comparative work between different components of the British Empire and North America, these two later periods are the most important for two reasons. First, evidence from other regions (Brooks 2009; Brooks and Rodríguez 2012) suggests that widespread distribution of British ceramics outside of the original North Atlantic core of the ceramics trade largely only occurs after the various global Napoleonic-era conflicts (The Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812, and the various wars of independence in South America). Second, one of the most important regions in the present discussion — Australia — was only permanently settled by Europeans in 1788. As such, the two Huntingdon phases with significant 19th-century components are by far the most important for the present comparisons.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Figures,List of Tables,
Introduction: The Importance of British Material Culture to Historical Archaeologies of the Nineteenth Century Alasdair Brooks,
1. At the Center of the Web: Later Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Ceramics from Huntingdon Town Centre in an International Context Alasdair Brooks, Aileen Connor, and Rachel Clarke,
2. Containers and Teapots: Archaeological Evidence for the Exported Wares of the Caledonian Pottery, Rutherglen, and Its Role in Glasgow's Ceramic International Trade and Industry Chris Jarrett, Morag Cross, and Alistair Robertson,
3. "A Trifling Matter"?: State Branding on Stoneware Bottles, 1812–1834 Jennifer Basford,
4. Uncovering and Recovering Cleared Galloway: The Role of Documents in Rural Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Lowland Scotland C. Broughton Anderson,
5. The Fall of Big Hair: Hair Curlers as Evidence of Changing Fashions Carolyn L. White,
6. Food as Material Culture in a Nineteenth-Century Ecclesiastical Community, Worcester, England Richard Thomas,
7. "Perfection and Economy": Continuity and Change in Elite Dining Practices, ca. 1780–1880 Annie Gray,
8. Material Culture in Miniature: The Historical Archaeology of Nineteenth-Century Miniature Objects Ralph Mills,
9. Artifacts of Mortuary Practice: Industrialization, Choice, and the Individual Harold Mytum,
10. "Home"-Made: Exploring the Quality of British Domestic Goods in Nineteenth-Century Urban Assemblages Penny Crook,
11. Shadows after Sunset: Imperial Materiality and the Empire's Lost Things James Symonds,
Contributors,
Index,