Helen Haskell

“ It is important to record carefully all the artifacts found together as well as their relationships to one another and to the deposit from which they were removed. Artifacts taken from the ground without proper recording are removed from their archeological context, and the information they hold is forever lost. Aimless “treasure” digging has destroyed much of our historical heritage. The Middleton Place privy collection illustrates how proper care, recording, and analysis can reveal new information. ”

“ At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most bottles in the United States and England were either free-blown—formed on the end of a blowpipe without aid of a mold—or blown into a one-piece “dip mold” that formed only the basic body shape. Neither of these processes allowed large-scale production of oddly shaped or embossed containers, and since even dip-molded bottles were formed by hand above the shoulder, the bottles tended to be asymmetrical. ”

“ The artifacts from the Middleton Place privy present a unique opportunity to observe one aspect of this plantation’s past. This collection of ceramics, bottles, and other items constitute the refuse discarded by the occupants of Middleton Place following the Civil War. It reflects their needs and tastes and represents an unconscious record of activities a century ago. Artifacts in the collection include items from an earlier time as well as things purchased throughout the last half of the nineteenth century. ”

“ Like earlier wares, most of the stone china sold in the United States was imported from Great Britain. The fledgling American pottery industry did not begin producing hard-paste whitewares until after 1860, and throughout the nineteenth century American-made ironstone was considered inferior to imported china. Much of the early American potter’s energy went into the production of common utility items, which, like the probably American-made chamberpot in Figure 8, were often unmarked to hide their domestic origins. ”

“ Built in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, the privy was one of the few plantation buildings to escape destruction by Sherman’s troops in 1865. In its long lifetime it has served as an outdoor latrine, a generator house, and a storage building. Now, newly equipped with running water and flush toilets, it is the only antebellum building at Middleton Place still serving the purpose for which it was constructed.
An outdoor privy may seem an unlikely place to conduct an archeological excavation. ”

“ For commercial packers, an early and lasting solution was the tin-plated canister, patented in England in 1810 and in the United States in 1825. An inexpensive and effective closure for glass containers had to await John Mason’s 1858 patent of the threaded jar seal, which consisted of a molded screw thread that allowed the cap to seal on the shoulder rather than the uneven lip of the jar. Home canners still use a similar screw-top jar today.
Many Americans, both civilian and military, had their first taste of commercially canned foods during the Civil War. ”

“ Manufacture of European porcelain had not ceased during the years British earthenware dominated the American ceramic market, but the nature of the product had changed considerably. The French porcelain industry, in particular, had evolved from a restricted craft patronized by royalty to a number of independently owned factories turning out standardized dinnerwares for the public taste. These relatively inexpensive wares appealed to Americans as well as Europeans, 22 and French porcelains were imported in quantity beginning around 1850. ”

“ Pressed glass is formed with a plunger in a mold on one or more pieces. Pressed glass items are comparatively thick-walled, have smooth molded lips, usually with mold seams, and often are distinguished by a short, straight shear mark, like an isolated mold line, on the inside base. ”

“ In Henry’s early years at Middleton Place, rice had been cultivated in inland swamps irrigated with water from man-made reservoirs. By the late eighteenth century, soil exhaustion had begun to pose a problem, and many planters, including the Middletons, changed to tidal rice cultivation that involved impounding freshwater swamps along the rivers’ edges and allowing them to be flooded by the natural action of the river tides. ”

“ Slavery was an economic mainstay of agriculture throughout the South, but particularly so in South Carolina, where slaves had been imported from Barbados with the very earliest settlers at Charles Town and where a plantation system 6 based on involuntary servitude had existed since the late seventeenth century. By the early 1700s African slaves already made up three-quarters of the South Carolina population, and on the eve of the Civil War, South Carolina remained the largest slaveholding state in the Union. Colleton District, where Middleton Place was located, was nearly 80% black. ”

“ In 1859, drillers in Pennsylvania brought in the nation’s first producing oil well, an event that was to alter radically the lives of generations of Americans. The first revolution achieved by this versatile new fuel was not in mechanical power, but in lighting. A working oil field made possible the manufacture of kerosene, a promising coal and petroleum-based illuminant that had been patented in New York in 1854 but had not been put into production because of the scarcity of one of its principal ingredients. ”

“ Thus, even if two household sites are separated by hundreds of years of technological innovation, they may yield utensils used for roughly the same purposes. If two contemporary sites 9 produce artifacts of the same style and workmanship, then their inhabitants shared at least some aspects of a single culture, and variations between the sites can provide valuable clues to adaptations of that culture to different circumstances.
The distinction between prehistoric and historical archeology is based not on differences in technology but on the presence or absence of written records. ”

“ Little hard paste porcelain was produced in England, where bone china, a somewhat softer porcelain with calcined ox bone added to the paste, became a favorite material for expensive dinnerwares. Oriental influence on British ceramics was more immediately felt in the British decorative style, which through the nineteenth century continued to borrow heavily from the Chinese and Japanese. ”

“ Dozens of British factories quickly took up manufacture of creamware, and it became a staple dinnerware throughout Europe and America. It remained a popular British and American tableware until the 1820s, after which it degenerated into a common utilitarian crockery. Known 18 as “C.C. ware,” creamware finished out the nineteenth century as the cheapest of the heavy utility wares, used chiefly for such items as mixing bowls and chamber pots. ”

“ The American Revolution took a heavy toll on South Carolina. Several major campaigns were fought in the former colony, and Charleston and the surrounding lowcountry were occupied by the British from 1780 to 1782. During this time, 63 leading Charlestonians, including Arthur Middleton, were imprisoned in British St. Augustine. By 1780, Henry was seriously ill, and, like other lowcountry residents, he and his sons suffered serious financial losses from the plunder and disruption that accompanied the British occupation. ”

“ Although vastly diminished quantities of rice continued to be harvested elsewhere in the lowcountry, Middleton Place apparently never again produced a successful rice crop. By 1890 rice from Louisiana, where flat upland fields permitted mechanized cultivation impossible in the South Carolina marshes, had begun to drive Carolina rice off the market. Today no rice at all is grown in South Carolina. ”

“ While prehistoric archeologists reconstruct ancient cultures primarily from artifactual evidence, historical archeology employs both documents and material remains to study literate societies and the pre-literate populations whom they influenced. In much of Europe and Asia, the historic period begins centuries before Christ, but in North America, historical archeology is concerned with the period of recorded European exploration and occupation extending from the sixteenth century to the present. ”

“ The decanter on the right with more restrained fluting around the base only is probably part of a shouldered 28 decanter of a style most common before about 1830. Victorian glasscutters frequently reproduced older styles, however, in the thousands of decanters that were turned off the wheel before decanters ceased to be an everyday tableware around World War I.
In the late 1820s American glassmakers introduced the side-lever glass press, a device that could form wide-mouthed glass items by pressing them against a mold with a plunger. ”

“ One of the few restrictions placed on the more dangerous medicaments was packaging. In 1872 the American Medical Association, concerned over accidental poisoning, issued a recommendation that potentially harmful substances be bottled in distinctively colored containers that were also recognizable by touch. One result of this directive was blue quilted poison bottles (Fig. 17D) . A specialty of Whitall, Tatum & Co., a major manufacturer of pharmaceutical wares, these bottles were manufactured until about 1920. ”

“ Narrow-necked bottles, however, could not be manufactured on “press-and-blow” machines because the plunger for the pressing operation could not be withdrawn through a narrow opening. Although a “blow-and-blow” machine for narrow-necked bottles was developed in England in the late 1880s, semiautomatics for small-mouthed ware were apparently not introduced in the U.S. until after the development of the automatic Owens bottle machine in 1903.
The Owens machine, invented by Michael J. Owens of the Toledo Glass Co., was put into production in 1904. ”

“ The artifacts left in the house spanned Susan and her husband’s entire lifetimes, from the costly dinnerwares of the wealthy planter to the plain stone china of his widow. As much as any exhibit at Middleton Place, then, the artifacts on display in the Spring House Museum bear testimony to the cycle of wealth and poverty, prosperity and decay, that characterized the nineteenth century Middletons and their plantation.
12 POTTERY AND PORCELAIN
The Industrial Revolution introduced an era of mass production, technological efficiency, and mass consumption. ”

“ By examining the record of activities that people have left in the soil, archeology can provide written history with a comparatively unbiased account of the economic conditions underlying historical change. ”

“ Probably the most obvious indicators of past living conditions are buildings, around which most human activities are centered. On most historic sites these include not only residences but also a variety of outbuildings such as privies, barns, and work buildings that are crucial to understanding the site as a whole. ”

“ First, where man has lived for any length of time, he has left behind artifacts—bits of food, broken pottery, tools, and ornaments—that tell us something of his way of life. Second, human behavior is, to a certain extent, patterned and predictable, and similar artifacts will be found on similar sites. ”

“ Decal-printing was first used on European 24 ceramics around 1900, and it remains a popular ceramic decoration today.
Most of the popular Austrian porcelains were manufactured near Carlsbad in Bohemia, which after World War I became a part of modern Czechoslovakia. After World War I Czechoslovakia and other European countries continued to dominate the American porcelain market. ”

“ These limited uses can nonetheless result in a large number of empty containers. Food bottles are usually one of the most numerous items found in a household trash heap. At Middleton Place, only four of a total of seventy-seven bottles were food containers, and all had originally held the preserves, flavorings, and oils that are usually packaged in glass. Figure 23A shows a “One-pound American preserve,” a jar sold at the turn of the century by at least one glass company, and Figure 23B is a typical late nineteenth/early twentieth century olive oil bottle. ”

“ In addition, historians are often most interested in aspects of daily life—such as health, diet, and the living conditions of the unlettered poor—that are frequently omitted altogether from written records. ”

“ Despite the development of nearly pure white earthenwares in the early 1800s, British potters continued throughout the nineteenth century to add the blue-tinted pearlware glaze to earthenwares of many different compositions. ”

“ Early transfer patterns imitated the Chinese and were engraved into the copper plates in a series of deep lines, but a technique combining lines and stippling, which allowed for greater detail and shading, was introduced about 1810. With this and other developments, Oriental designs gave way to pastoral and architectural scenes—English, Alpine, Italianate, and American, among many others—usually surrounded by borders of English flowers (Fig. 7) . ”

“ Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 1970 A guide to artifacts of colonial America. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 75 Revi, Albert C. 1964 American pressed glass and figure bottles. Thomas Nelson & Sons, New York. Russell, Loris 1968 A heritage of light. University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Scoville, Warren C. 1948 Revolution in glassmaking: entrepreneurship and technological change in the American glass industry, 1880-1920. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. South, Stanley A. 1977. Method and theory in historical archeology. Academic Press, New York. Toulouse, Julian H. 1969a A primer on mold seams. ”