Page 36 - Maryland Historical Trust - Archaeology Colonial MD

functions. We then consulted the names 17th- century colonists had actually used for their ceramic vessels in household inventories, and tried to link them with the vessels excavated from St. John’s and other sites. By combining vessel shape, purpose and name, we finally had a way to systematically compare the pottery collec- tions from sites throughout the Chesapeake and beyond (see figure 23).13
At St. Johns, large quantities of dairying vessels such as milk pans and butter pots were present during the first decades but there were few individual drinking vessels. The last decades of habitation had a completely different pottery pattern. There were fewer dairying vessels and personal drinking vessels like cups, drinking pots, and mugs made up half the total. We initially thought the many drinking vessels might have been due to St. John’s serving as an inn, but when a similar vessel pattern was found at a private plantation across the Potomac from St. Mary’s, this explanation no longer worked. It was actually related to a broader transition in English culture to individual drinking and dining vessels instead of shared ceramics that had predominated in earlier periods.
Most of the pottery was used in some way relating to food preparation or eating and drink- ing, but what were the people eating at St. John’s? Was their diet similar to or different from that of England and did it change through time? The earliest effort to explicitly answer these questions in the region came from the study of animal re- mains excavated at St. John’s. We know that meat was very significant in the 17th-century English diet and animal bones (faunal remains) can not only tell about the types of animals eaten but also the relative significance of each type in the diet.
I began faunal analysis in the autumn of 1974 and work continued over the next five years. The first step was to sort the thousands of bones from the varied features into the general type of animal they came from (mammal, bird, fish, etc.) and then group these by animal size. Next each bone was compared to specimens of known an- imals to conclusively determine what they were. This first required obtaining skeletons of known animals to allow the analysis and for several years I was nicknamed “Road Kill Miller” for my fre- quent stops on highways to examine and some- times collect useful dead animals. After all the bones of a particular species were identified and counted, the next step was to learn how many
figure 20
Staffordshire Slipware mug from St. John’s, ca. 1675-1685.
figure 21
Rhenish Blue and Gray Stoneware ewer partially reconstructed from St. John’s, ca. 1660.
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individual animals a group of bones represented. For example, four right and six left tibias would indicate a minimum of 6 animals. However, if all six of the left tibias were from mature animals and two of the right ones were from young animals, there must have been at least 8 animals present.
The average amount of meat each of these could have contributed was determined next, allowing the relative importance of each animal type in the diet to be estimated. In this, there was a critical assumption that most of a slaughtered