Page 34 - Maryland Historical Trust - Archaeology Colonial MD

figure 17
White clay cherub figure from St. John’s.
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in English vessels and non-English goods taxed. Enforcement was lax until the later 1660s and 1670s but the impact of these laws was visible in the archaeological record at St. Mary’s City. Aside from the durable and attractive Rhenish wares that remained popular, virtually all the non-English pottery had disappeared from the tables and kitchens of Maryland colonists. One exception was high status Chinese porcelain that began to appear in small quantities in the second half of the century on wealthy sites. These pots were coming through the expanding British East India Company.
Only a few colonial potters making low quality earthenware worked in the Chesapeake. Of these, Maryland’s first European potter was Morgan Jones, who was brought to St. Mary’s County, Maryland in 1661 as the indentured servant of a merchant. Jones continued making ceramics in southern Maryland, the Virginia side of the Potomac or on the Eastern Shore from the early 1660s to his death in 1690. Based upon the excavations at one of his kiln sites in Virginia12, I was able to identify his wares at St. John’s and Morgan Jones pottery became a key dating tool for the post-1660 period in Maryland. Through
these efforts, the St. John’s ceramics collection became the defining type set for early colonial archaeology in the state.
Counting sherds by pottery type is a standard approach for ceramics analysis in archaeology but Garry Stone and the museum’s first curator, George Miller, recognized that people used pots, not sherds, in life and to achieve really mean- ingful cultural insights, one had to study what they purchased and used — the pots. So, they recommended an analysis procedure called the minimum number of vessels (MNV ). Determin- ing this required sorting the sherds by type, then placing those most similar in appearance together. This included examining a sherd’s surface treat- ment and color, clay texture, color and inclusions, its thickness, shape of the original vessel, and any unique features. Fragments found near each other often allowed glue fits to be easily identified, thereby piecing together various broken parts of the original vessel and gradually achieving a bet- ter understanding of each pot. Experience was a big factor here, because the more one examined and pondered the fragments, it became easier to recognize those fragments that should group and perhaps glue together. Glue fits give indis-