Page 87 - Maryland Historical Trust - Archaeology Colonial MD

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Utilitarian coarse earthenwares, Stevens plantation (18CV279).
hold established for the purpose of participation in the Indian trade. Only trace amounts of brick were recovered from Fair Fountain along with a few fragments of flat glass that may be window glass. Fair Fountain is remarkable for its distribution of ceramics. Only 18 European-made ceramics were recovered from the fourteen test units excavated at the site. The bulk of the ceramic assemblage con- sists of Native-made Potomac Creek wares (63 fragments). Although it is possible that the Euro- pean and Native ceramics are not contemporary, artifact distribution maps do suggest a relationship.
Turner and Fair Fountain, sites representing poor or tenant planters and their households, re- veal a truism about archaeology: archaeologists tend to focus on sites that yield greater quantities of artifacts, creating some of the same kinds of biases found in the documentary record. Archae- ological sites rich in artifacts — such as those oc- cupied by a planter and his family — tend to be
valued more than those leaving only an ephem- eral material signature in the ground.53 Servants and slaves, who built these houses and worked in them, tend to be invisible. However, this invisi- bility is more a function of how the record is seen than how the record really is. Take as an example, Eleanor Butler, Thomas Notley’s servant who (as noted at the beginning of this chapter) married the enslaved Charles. Documentary evidence re- veals that she ran the Notley household and lived in the house. Eleanor had her own heated sleep- ing room in the mansion. Her familiarity with the important political figures passing through the house gave her the confidence to tell Lord Baltimore she intended to marry Charles even as the proprietor advised against it. Eleanor’s status as described in Notley’s inventory in 1679 — “an [unnamed] Irish wench at the house” — may have signaled her unremarkable status to the apprais- ers, but her legacy survives in the legal questions
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PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE MARYLAND ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONSERVATION LABORATORY.