Utah Pottery Project Archaeology Blog

Lecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, February 24th, 2011

2011-02-23T16:10:00.002-06:00

The Utah Pottery Project: Historical and Industrial Archaeology of a Pioneer Industry

Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and Program in Archaeology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Location: 209A Davenport Hall, Thurs., February 24, 3:00 pm

Presented by Dr. Timothy Scarlett
Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies
Industrial Heritage and Archaeology
Department of Social Sciences
Michigan Technological University

The Utah Pottery Project began as a study of the social business of potting in nineteenth-century Utah, one of the “folk hearths” of the United States. In establishing the project, I sought to design a study that capitalized upon archaeology’s interdisciplinary potential in the broadest sense of that term, intertwining the sciences, arts, and humanities in a single intellectual effort. Now that we have demonstrated the power of this approach, the study is evolving in two directions. First, my collaborators and I continue expanding archaeometric and historical analyses of trade and exchange, tracing routes of social interaction and weighing their significances. At the same time, we have begun detailed, ecobiographic studies of individual potters, shops, and potting groups. Immigrant potters had backgrounds that varied from industrial workers and managers to artisanal apprentices in many different social and technological contexts. The colonization of Utah provides an opportunity to study individuals engaged in social processes which otherwise appear as anonymous in the archaeological record, of particular interest are technological creativity, technology transfer, adaptation, and landscape learning.

Lecture in Salt Lake City, Friday, May 7th.

2010-04-30T19:17:00.000-05:00

I am giving a lecture next Friday at the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City. I will speak at 7 P.M. in the museum auditorium, and their new exhibit of pottery will be open. The exhibit grew out of the Potters of the Gathering show from last year, but is a new show curated by Kirk Henrichsen. They will have several archaeological objects on view from both the Utah Pottery Project and Utah State Parks collections, as well as antiques from the Gary and Jill Thompson Collection and the Church History Museum's own collection.

I will talk about last summer's excavation of the Davenport Family Pottery Shop in Parowan. The museum asked for my abstract and title, and this is what I sent:

Ten Years of The Utah Pottery Project: Archaeological Questions and Answers.

After more than ten years of preparation, Timothy Scarlett led industrial archaeology students last summer to undertake the first major archaeological excavation of a pioneer-era Latter-day Saint pottery shop. In an illustrated lecture, Dr. Scarlett will overview the scholarship of Utah Pottery Project and explain the last summer's discoveries at the site of the Davenport Family Pottery Shop in Parowan, Utah (1855-1888). The results of that excavation and ongoing laboratory research open a fascinating window into challenges and struggles faced by Utah's nineteenth century potters and their families.

Congratulations to Jessica Montcalm

2010-04-24T16:53:00.001-05:00

On Thursday, April 22nd, Jessica Montcalm successfully defended her Master's Thesis in Industrial History and Archaeology, which she titled: A Burning Question: Archaeology at the Davenport Pottery and Technological Adaptation in the Mormon Domain.

While she has some revisions and editing to finish, her committee was impressed with how much she had learned and accomplished over the last year. Many of this blog's readers will recall that Ms. Montcalm was the assistant archaeologist during the excavation and field school last summer. She volunteered her time over the past year both processing and cataloging artifacts in the lab, while also supervising other volunteers in the lab.

I will discuss some of her findings when I speak at the Church History Museum's exhibit opening early in May.

Congratulations to Jessica for all her hard work.

This is the penultimate abstract:

The archaeological excavations and the associated artifact analysis at the Davenport Pottery in Parowan, Utah, serve to inform questions of landscape learning and technological adaptation in unfamiliar geographic settings. Thomas Davenport and his family immigrated to the Utah Territory from Brampton, England, in order to answer the call to gather issued by the leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He, along with thousands of other settlers moved into and occupied a geographic region unknown to their prior experience. Studies of prehistoric peoples' colonization of unfamiliar landscapes indicate that unfamiliar and challenging geographical surroundings hinder successful or long-lasting colonization. By contrast, the experience of the Mormon settlers, including Thomas Davenport, provides a unique situation for inquiry in which a large population made use of exhaustive planning and active restructuring of unfamiliar geographic settings, resulting in successful and lasting settlements. Analysis of the archaeological remains associated with the kiln at the Davenport pottery shop provide physical evidence of one man's learning in an unfamiliar landscape. The remains also highlight cultural preferences as a basis for technological choice, and lend to an adaptive technological discussion regarding the form of kiln used by Davenport.

News update: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

2010-04-24T16:19:00.000-05:00

The good news:

Now that the academic semester is almost at an end, I will spend a bit of time on the project preparing some artifacts for a new exhibition! The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Church History Museum is going to install a version of Potters of the Gathering in their lobby. The exhibit will open May 7th. Kirk Henrichsen is using pottery to remind people about nineteenth century foodways and domestic life, to explore the ideal of self-sufficiency in Latter-day Saint communities, and to show people how important archaeology is as a tool to increase our understandings of the past.

Mr. Henrichsen has gathered together some new material for this show. He will be using most of the important objects from the original exhibit- including the Thompson Collection, the Utah State Parks Collection (including the Deseret Pottery artifacts), and the Utah Pottery Project collection. He has also found some other cool items to include, such as a Deseret Agricultural and Manufacturing Association Medal from the Territorial Fair, which will be displayed with some award winning pots! It should be a great show and will be the first time most of this material has been exhibited to the public in Salt Lake City.

The museum has invited me to give a talk at the opening and I am excited to see the new installation.

The bad news:

Both organizations declined the proposals I'd written seeking funds for more work. One of the grants would have supported additional fieldwork. The other sought funds to allow more experiments to develop and refine ceramic rehydroxylation dating (RHX dating). No matter how many times it happens, reviewers rejections always sting a little, even when accompanied by encouragement to "revise and resubmit."

Either way, the lack of support funds means that we will box up the artifacts and put more of the analysis on hold for the summer. I'll be co-teaching the 2010 Industrial Heritage and Archaeology Field School this summer at the site of the Cliff Mine in Keweenaw County in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

I'll continue to collaborate with my friends in Materials Science. Since Patrick Bowen was awarded two grants for undergraduate research, we will move as far ahead as we can investigating reydroxylation. I think he will work with Jarek Drelich to characterize the clay and ceramic used by the Davenports and try to figure out the significance of the different water-absorbtion processes at work in ceramics.

We'll reflect on the reviewers' comments for a few days and then meet to plan the strategy for the rest of the summer and the fall term.

Congratulations to Patrick Bowen

2010-04-07T19:38:00.001-05:00

I am pleased to congratulate Patrick Bowen, Michigan Technological University undergraduate student in Materials Science and Engineering. Mr. Bowen won two major fellowship competitions and he was awarded funds for his ongoing collaborations studying rehydroxylation dating of archaeological ceramics. He was awarded one of Michigan Tech's Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (SURF) Fellowships as well as a Michigan Space Consortium Undergraduate Research Fellowship.

Patrick has been an important part of the interdisciplinary research team that Jarek Drelich and I put together to assess this newly published dating technique. Mr. Bowen, Helen Ranck, and Jessica Beck, three MTU undergraduates in the Departments of Materials Science and Social Science, did exceptional work designing tests to assess the usefulness of RHX Dating for the Utah Pottery Project. Patrick is presenting the preliminary results of their analysis at MTU's 2010 Undergraduate Research Expo.

The SURF and MSC Fellowship programs are both very competitive and I am proud of Mr. Bowen for his successful applications!

We are waiting to hear decisions on the proposal I wrote to support more field research as well as a National Science Foundation proposal to support more research into Rehydroxylation Dating.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed on our outstanding proposals!

Ash Glazes and the Curious Pits

2010-02-25T10:37:00.003-06:00

Last week, I arranged for a local glaze technician, Derik Spoon, to stop in and take a peek at some of the broken bits of pottery still out on the table. Long background story short, I took a pottery class at the local arts center, and imagine my surprise and excitement when the instructor informed us that he just moved to the area from a job as a glaze tech with a major producer of glazes available commercially to ceramic artists across the country... He agreed to stop in and take a look at what we recovered.

He immediately identified the type of glaze used on all of the pieces we had out on the table, and what he had to say ran contrary to everything we thought so far. Derik informed us that every piece on the table was glazed with an ash glaze.

Ash glazes, as Derik explained, are the simplest of glazes to make, consisting of processed ash mixed with clay and water. The ash typically is soaked and filtered through water to draw off the majority of the heavy alkali materials (a convenient by-product of this process is lye, a key ingredient for soap making; it would have been a sought-after product in any pioneering settlement with limited contact to larger supply networks), before being mixed with refined clay. Water is then added to the mix, and the mixture is applied to the vessels. Ash glazes leave very identifiable (to a trained glaze technician) markers on ceramics, including pooling or streaking of colors, and often a gritty appearance on the surface of the vessel. The effects of the glaze naturally differ depending on numerous factors such as the type of wood ash used, the type of clay used, the ratio of ash to clay to water, the firing time and temperature, the amount of fly ash in the kiln during firing, and the final cooling time of the wares in the kiln.

This all leads up to a new theory regarding the "random" ash pits located toward the front of the lot and the enclosed area of clay-like hard pack. These areas could very well have been where Thomas and the family were processing ash with various inclusions (bone, bisqued ceramics) for the purpose of color/effect experimentation, before mixing the ash with the refined clay to glaze the pottery. The material in the enclosure could be the refined clay used in the glaze mixture, or a large, ready supply of pre-mixed clay and ash drawn off of the neighboring ash pits. In any case, this is a very exciting revelation, and it offers possible explanations to the question, "What in the world was going on over there?"

Video of Carol Wright

2010-02-03T08:51:00.004-06:00

This short video captures Mrs. Wright's visit to the Davenport Pottery Site in June of 2009. I am telling her about what the archaeology has taught us about the history of the pottery. You can see that I am showing her how well her sketch map matched the magnetometry data and our discoveries underground. I also think you can see her smile at the end.

Mark Dice took part in our field school this summer. It was his first experience with archaeology. Mark is a teacher and musician, and he is also a talented media specialist. Mark owns Dice Video and I am very grateful for his help as part of our research team last summer as well as his willingness to share his media kung-fu with us!

Carol Adams Wright, 1908-2009

2010-02-01T10:05:00.005-06:00

This weekend, I was saddened to learn that "Christmas Carol" Wright died last October. I had not heard the news until now, so I set aside a moment in my workday this morning to reflect on Mrs. Wright's contributions to the Utah Pottery Project research effort.

Mrs. Wright was Thomas and Sarah Davenport's great-granddaughter. Carol was born to Thomas Davenport Adams and Luella Redd Adams on Christmas day in 1909, an event for which she earned her nickname "Christmas Carol." The potters, Thomas and Sarah Davenport, were Carol's father's mother's parents. Carol's grandmother's siblings spent their youth working in the pot shop, perhaps also her grandmother at times. Carol's father worked at the shop when he was young and also spent his youth paying amid the shop's ruins before they were torn down.

Carol was practically a living eye-witness with first-hand knowledge of a Utah pottery. When I first met her in 1999, her memories of her youth and the stories told by her parents and grandparents were still sharp and clear records of the mid-nineteenth century. She welcomed me into her home and shared all her knowledge with me, at a time when I was a total stranger in the community. I had simply knocked on her door to ask about the history of empty lot next door. The sketch map that I drew with Mrs. Wright in 1999 guided our excavations and her stories helped us to find the shop's clay beds.

To the best of my knowledge, she was the last person in that generation in the entire state of Utah. The last to talk with people that had worked at potting to make a living. While some may still recall the Ogden or Provo factories of the 1920s and 30s, Carol had living memory from a pioneer-era pot shop.

I will forever be grateful that Mrs. Wright shared her stories with me. She was trusting, open, and kind when I was a young student-researcher, living out of my old truck, and walking around town with little else except my dusty notebook and enthusiasm.

Rest in peace, Mrs. Wright. Thank you.

Several Utah newspapers and ABC News 4 printed her Obituary last October, in 2009.

Lab Update- Dec. 3, 2009

2009-12-03T12:34:00.000-06:00

Jeffrey Lee and Allison Mehlenbacher have been working hard with Jessica Montcalm, washing, cataloging, and labeling the fragments of Davenport-made ceramic from the cellar pit feature at the site. Their efforts have begun to yield fruit! This week they finished labeling the artifacts from level 12, the largest and most densely packed layer of pottery waster fragments in the feature.

Jeff and Allison are now starting to sort out another level:

Now that the individual pieces are labeled, they are beginning to reconstruct ceramic vessels. This is like doing a jigsaw puzzle, but where someone removed 2/3 of the pieces, scratched off the puzzle picture or pattern, and warped, charred, and burned those fragments that remain. Despite those challenges, Jeff and Allison have already been able to substantially reconstruct two basins. I'm not sure what this vessel form is, but we are all excitedly discussing various possibilities! They are deep, tall basins with wide mouths, straight, but sloped sides, and flat rims.

Rehydroxylation Dating-- 10-21-09 update

2009-11-21T16:59:00.009-06:00

Our collaborating student researchers are making steady progress in their efforts to replicate the ceramic rehydroxylation dating technique published by Moira Wilson and her colleagues over the summer. If you wish to read all my posts about rehydroxylation, click here.

Helen Ranck, Patrick Bowen, and Jessica Beck have been working on different parts of the problem and they've learned a great deal so far.

Here is one of Helen's graphs that describes the mass gain of one of her test samples:

She and Patrick have been trying to find out the best way to keep the sherds at a constant temperature and atmosphere while the fragment absorbs water. Patrick has discovered some key changes in practice that have really helped reduce the variation in calculated dates, bringing the projections closer to our expectations. Jarek Drelich, associate professor in Michigan Tech's Materials Science and Engineering department, has been very helpful working with them both.

Jessica Beck has finished some of her testing. She calculated the porosity of a group of the sherds using a methodology outlined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Jessica discovered that the Davenports' earthenware ranges from 10%-15% porous, and that both the median and the mode will be around 13% or 14%. I'm looking forward to her final conclusions and her estimates on firing temperature as revealed through her other testing!

Lab photo update

2009-11-13T09:07:00.003-06:00

The students are working on their projects and Jessica is making progress on cataloging the collection from the Davenport Pottery site dig.

Max and Allison are cataloging their pottery frags and getting ready to start their cross-mending study.

Frank is studying the charcoal we recovered from our flotation of sediment samples. He hopes to describe the Davenport family's choices for fuel use when firing their kiln. He's examining little chunks of charcoal with an optical microscope.

This week I also taught the students the basics of archaeological drawing, drafting, and illustration. We learned by drawing two random objects from the stuff that I keep around the lab for activities just like this. This year we drew a mini-terra cotta warrior, lent to us by Pat Martin, and a model of someone's thumb.

Jeremy was doing a measured drawing using drafting tools.

After working with measured drawings, we also used digital photographs as tools to produce our drawings, but still working free-hand. I taught them stippling, a standard technique for technical illustration. Alison is drawing the thumb in these photos.

This photo and drawing are of the same thumb, but don't show the same view. You'll notice that the light falls from the left in the photo and the right in the drawing. This drawing was by Jessica Beck and was her first attempt to anything like this!

The students didn't finish any drawings, since these objects were just for exercises. If anyone ends up drawing objects in their project, we'll post the final drawings here. Over the summer, we also did technical drawings of the pottery in the Utah State Parks collection. Perhaps we will post some of those drawings as well.

Bleeding for my craft

2009-10-28T11:30:00.002-05:00

Hi All,

A brief update from the lab. Today I taught the students how to make stone tools, often called "flint knapping." Several of the students were really looking forward to this activity. They were pretty excited to try working the obsidian nodules into biface tools.

I'm afraid there weren't any budding Homo erectus the group, but they could have passed for Homo habilus.

All in all, however, they did better than Jessica and me. The total injury count (requiring band-aids):

Professor: 2

TA: 2

Class: 1 (and there are five of them!)
Next week, we are going to talk about glassmaking and archaeological analysis of glass, but we will also pull out the lithic fragments from the Davenport site and apply some of the practical skills everyone learned, using the new vocabulary to say, "This is the proximal and medial segment of a secondary reduction flake, complete with hackle lines and an eraillure scar indicating the striking platform above the bulb of percussion."

Mobile blog post

154 Years Ago This Week

2009-10-22T09:19:00.006-05:00

A little while ago, Noel Carmack emailed me about our research on the Davenport Pottery. Mr. Carmack teaches painting and drawing at the College of Eastern Utah. He wrote to me because he and Charles M. Hatch are just finishing a manuscript for publication with USU Press. They have edited the journals of James Henry Martineau, an early resident of Parowan and a surveyor.

Mr. Carmack wrote to me that he'd discovered something in Martineau's diary and he wanted to exchange information. In particular, he said to me that on October 29, 1855, Martineau had written:

"Oct. 29/To day, Thomas Davenport opened his kiln of Pottery. This is the first ever made south of Provo. I got two jars, some bowls and two meat dishes."

I was very excited by this reference because this diary entry had captured the exact day when the Davenports opened their first kiln of ware produced at their shop in Parowan. Readers that have been following the blog will remember Thomas's words transcribed from his now missing diary:

"I arrived in Parowan on November 4, [1852]. . . . I farmed and worked at my pottery trade until November 1855. I burned my first kiln, but it was nearly all broken. . . . I had another son born, but he only lived until August and died of the flu. . . . I burned another kiln of pottery but it was mostly broken. In the fall of 1856 we [Thomas and Sarah Burrows Davenport] got our endowments at Salt Lake City and stayed there until the spring of 1857. I then burned another kiln and about one third of these pieces were good. In 1851 [sic; 1859?] I built a house with six rooms and we moved into it. I had now learned to burn my ware without breaking it" (Nielsen 1963: 103).

Martineau's diary shows us that this transcription of Thomas Davenport's diary is probably accurate and that the Davenports opened their first kiln on October 29th, 1855------ 154 years ago (next week)! We also know that it took almost exactly three years to the day for the Davenport family to set up their household, farm, and shop until the first kiln firing.

My deep thanks to Noel for emailing me with this information.

Rehydroxylation Dating-- testing a new tool!

2009-10-10T17:16:00.007-05:00

While we were digging in the field this summer, a team of seven materials scientists (led by Moira Wilson) from the University of Manchester and the University of Edinburgh and Ian M. Betts, an archaeologist with the Museum of London, published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A called "Dating fired-clay ceramics using long-term power law rehydroxylation kenetics."

Three Michigan Technological University students, Helen Ranck, Patrick Bowen, and Jessica Beck, are trying to replicate the technique.

Materials scientists and engineers have known that ceramic minerals slowly reabsorb water from the environment after they are fired. Dr. Wilson's team discovered that the rate at which environmental water recombines with clay minerals as hydroxyls is governed by a kinetic law at the nano-scale. They found that the rate was influenced by temperature, but was not changed by the quantity of water present in the environment.

Scientists could actually measure the rate of water mass gain for any given ceramic fragment by heating a sample in a kiln and then waiting and measuring the increase in mass as the clay molecules slowly recombined with environmental moisture at a known temperature. Lab researchers can then calculate the date of firing with these known measurements:

1. This determined rate of water mass gain.

2. The mass of the sample after excavation (when it contained all the re-bonded water).

3. The mass of the sample after the test firing (mass of the ceramic fragment minus the molecularly recombined water mass that it had absorbed since it was fired).

4. The average temperature through time the sample experienced since firing in the depositional environment.

Of course, including the +/- error, universal in archeometric dating.

If this technique works as well as the authors assert, it will add another powerful tool to archaeological techniques around the world. It will also revolutionize the Utah Pottery Project. Remember that one of the main goals of our archaeological research is to reconstruct the learning process through which these individual potters or potting groups, such as the Davenport family, adapted their skills and knowledge to Utah's new environment and raw materials.

One of the biggest problems we've had is that we can not use the ceramic fragments themselves to date the features full of broken kiln wasters, such as Andy's excavation of the cellar feature this summer. We rely upon stratigraphic clues (that waster pile is older than X, but younger than Y) or other artifacts found in the deposits, like stylish imported ceramic fragments, which can be dated. The features full of industrial wasters only rarely also contain other clues, however.

There are some other archaeometric techniques archaeologists use to date ceramics directly, such as Archaeomagnetic Dating and Optically Stimulated Luminescence. These techniques are useful also, but are either very specific to only work on kiln foundations (archaeomagnetic) or expensive and require expertise we don't have (OSL or TL). Either way, most of those techniques work better when applied to the distant past, and not the nineteenth century.

Historical Archaeology is like ethnoarchaeology in many ways. Given that we are studying people and sites in the historic period, we know a great deal more about accurate temperatures than archaeologists studying deep antiquity. I have the advantage of knowing the year, and even the month, during which some of these ceramics were fired. I hope we can test and refine the technique to higher levels of precision.

If this technique works as described, we will have an inexpensive tool that will allow us to build direct chronologies from the waster fragments. We will be able to sort the Davenports' waste into categories and know which ones reflect the steep learning curve from the 1850s and which pieces have clues about ongoing improvement and the training of the next generation of potters!

Moira Wilson corresponded with me over the summer while we were digging, and I appreciate her encouragement to consider application of her team's work. I am excited to be working with this puzzle with Jaroslaw W. Drelich, an associate professor in MTU's Department of Materials Science and Engineering. The original article appeared here. Useful discussions and interesting commentary about rehydroxylation dating appeared here, here, and particularly here.

First Fall Term Update!

2009-10-03T11:05:00.007-05:00

The Utah Pottery Project is back on-line at this blog and on Facebook!

After a long break from the research blog, I am again posting updates. Starting today, I will write about our laboratory research. As we wash, catalog, and label the artifacts from last summer's dig at the Davenport Pottery Site, I'll post progress reports and connect the fieldwork with our lab analyses. Several interesting analyses are developing, and I will post updates when I can.

If I'm lucky, perhaps some of the students will write about what they are trying to learn in their projects.

There are several people helping out with the lab work and analyses right now. Jessica Montcalm, the project field director, is leading the processing of the artifacts in the lab, managing the flow of cleaning, conserving, and cataloging. Frank McGuire has also continued on since his time in the field. He has been helping Jessica to process the finds. This week, Frank and Jessica finished floating the soil samples taken during the dig this summer. The students enrolled in my Archaeological Sciences class helped with this process as they learned about floatation, archaeobotany, and geoarchaeology during the first few weeks of the term.

In this picture, Frank is measuring sample volume and mass before floatation.

After putting samples of dirt from different features and soil layers into water, light organic matter floats to the surface where we catch it for analysis. This method allows us to find seeds, charcoal fragments, bits of wood and shell-- lots of detail about the environment surrounding the site!

Jessica and Frank have help from some of the students enrolled my Archaeological Sciences course at Michigan Tech. Some of the class members have elected to study the Davenport Pottery dig artifacts for their semester research projects.

Allison and Jeff have decided to study the artifacts from the cellar feature that Andy excavated over the summer. They are going to help clean and label all the fragments from this feature so that they can try reconstructing all the broken pots. They will take out all the sherds, like the large ones pictured in the bucket below, and spread them out on the lab tables like a giant archaeological jigsaw puzzle!

Filling the units!

2009-06-26T12:26:00.001-05:00

Filling...

Mobile blog post

Backfilling and the Future

2009-06-26T08:01:00.004-05:00

Today we will backfill all our units.

The research now transitions into the lab and the library. The blog won't end here. Over the summer, we'll make more entries about the other excavation units. Perhaps some of the students will finally write for the blog and post photographs. Jessica and I will keep updating the blog all next year during the analysis and write up, as we complete artifact analyses, lab tests, and experiments.

These are some of the overall site pictures that we took before sunrise yesterday, when the City of Parowan lent us a cherry-picker bucket truck.

This picture shows the relationship between the kiln, the cellar, and the northern workshop building.

Here is a detail shot of the kiln, showing the fully excavated firebox, flue, and outline:

Another overall shot that shows the relationship between the opening of the trench that leads to the firebox and the opening of the workshop basement door:

A great picture of this great crew on the last day, just before we broke up for our final jobs:

Lines in the sand (and ash, bone, and pottery)

2009-06-21T10:34:00.010-05:00

As Frank and myself opened up the new unit 26s 18w it was because of a promising shovel test pit between 26s 18w and 28s 18w.On the magnetometer reading there was an anomaly located there, which we thought might yield another kiln or industrial structure (having found one kiln we were anxious to locate another). At the bottom of the test pit we found pieces of brick and also some clay and ash. To the left is a closing picture of 28s 18w, with the shovel test pit to the north and what turned out to be Dr. Scarlett's shovel test pit from 2001. In the bottom right corner there was another ash pit, and by the end of both 28s and 26s Frank and myself would be buried under a myriad of forms relating to these puzzles. With an old shovel test pit and an ash pit found, we turned our attention to 26s 18w, north of the unit pictured in an attempted to locate a possible foundation.

During the course of our dig in the unit we found numerous ash pits, a pile of pottery and household waste, and some fence posts from the 20th century.To the left, you can see an ash pit in the top of the unit with the ash, bone, and pottery pit in the center and the shovel test pit towards the bottom. While a foundation failed to materialize we did uncover some very interesting stratigraphy, or layers of soil in the side walls. It looked as if pits has been dug, filled with ash and other debris and had nearby topsoil layered over it.

So as Frank and myself dug out the ash, bone, and pottery debris pit in the center of the unit we got about 20-25cm down. However, if we had stayed in the center of the unit we might have missed the bigger picture in 26s 18w. As this picture show, the side walls brought forth much more questions. The dark ash pit it the far wall and then towards the right the ash and clay that was at the bottom of the test pit. Also the debris at the bottom of the shovel test pit turned out to be a ash and clay pit dug into the surrounding reddish brown soil (which can be seen to the left of the picture). So what we had in this unit were four ash pits dug into the soil, maybe at different times; all of the pits were covered with the reddish brown soil. One possible answer is they were dug then covered over by nearby topsoil? Still the question remains, why dig a pit to throw ash, bone and pottery in when the ash and pottery could have been left on the surface.

In the end the soil came to the reddish brown layer with no remaining ash pits-and we had some great examples of stratigraphy.In the picture to the right you can see

e the dark ash pit suspended in the side wall, higher up than the bottom of the ash, bone and pottery pit that was in the center. Usually the older artifacts are buried deeper in the soil; however with the various heights of the deposits that basic idea is also called into question in this unit. We found some great pieces of local pottery in the central pit, two fence posts and some great differentiation in the soil of the side walls. Each day brings us a more complete understanding of the site, and even more questions regarding the uses and functions of simple features like ash pits.

More Press

2009-06-20T14:14:00.003-05:00

I just mentioned the nice piece written by Nur Kausar for the Cedar City Daily News (TheSpectrum.com). A second story was in today's papers. Mark Havnes wrote a story for the Salt Lake Tribune. You can read the story here.

Mark's piece is interesting, but what draws my attention is the discussion and commentary that follows the article. These comments refer to the recent arrests, suicides, and protests in Blanding, Utah, following the indictment of about 20 people for looting archaeological sites on federal land. The arrests and deaths continue to make national news. In my opinion, the entire mess is unfortunate.

From the very first comment on Mr. Havnes's article, Tribune readers make assumptions about my interest in the Davenports and their pottery shop. One implies that I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which I'm not. The Tribune's readers comments, like the thousands of vitriolic comments written after the main articles about the arrests, show how high emotions have risen over the events in Blanding. The entire event has become a scene where people can act out the Mormon/Anti-Mormon/non-Mormon, inside/outside, majority/minority social politics of the state.

I hope people reading about my research will discover it on their own terms, instead of the stage as set in Blanding. I find so much potential in what we are going here. With this project, I have tried to show the exciting opportunities for community-based, public archaeology in Utah. There are about 45 sites in almost 30 different cities and towns where we could continue joining communities to study the potters and clay workers of the nineteenth century. Such research is powerful because it creates empathy in society. If the e-commentary and the blogosphere are any indication of the role of archaeology and preservation in Utah's cultures and communities, then the people in this state need to draw upon all the empathy they can muster.

Davenport Dig Review

2009-06-20T10:05:00.006-05:00

Last night Jessica and I presented a summary of the summer's discoveries in Parowan. The city staff booked us into the historic Aladdin Theater, the old movie house that they converted into a community theater. About 100 people came out to see our presentation! Nur Kausar wrote a nice summary for this morning's Cedar City Daily News.

I gave an overview of the Utah Pottery Project and then Jessica took the audience through the site, explaining the different buildings and activity areas we had uncovered. After the overview, I spoke about the experimental research we undertook before this summer and what directions our research may take us in the future.

I undertook this entire research dig as a kind of public archaeology. We opened the site and welcomed visitors all day and every day. I operated the dig in this manner because I believe strongly in community-based public archaeology. Public archaeology showcases archaeological research as a collaborative process, like a journey of discovery. I invited people from Parowan's different communities to join us as partners in the research, instead of subjects or consultants. We have been building relationships with the community and I hope that our partnerships continue to flourish in the future as we consider future research and public programming, such as imagining the operating replica of the Davenport Pottery site for the Iron Mission State Park Museum.

Of course, as a public archaeology program, we are seeking partners who want to facilitate the research and community partnerships by providing scholarships and support for students to work it the lab and field studies. If you are interested, please click here for more information on how you can help as an individual, a foundation, or an corporation.

Last night's public lecture and presentation was an opportunity to give a more formal summary of what we have accomplished thus far. I was also able to extend our deep thanks to the members of the community who have prepared treats for the research team - from delivering burritos or cookies to the dig, hosting picnic dinners for us, and inviting us to swim in their pools. I don't think I've ever felt so welcomed by a community.

I am very grateful to the Utah Humanities Council for their financial support of the public programming elements of this field project. The UHC also supported my early attempts to get the project going, which resulted in the current programmatic agreement between Michigan Tech and Utah State Parks. As I said last night, the UHC asks that each event sponsored by their organization include this statement:

"This program has received funding from the Utah Humanities Council. The Utah Humanities Council promotes understanding of diverse traditions, values, and ideas through informed public discussion."

Final Week's Big Push

2009-06-20T09:15:00.005-05:00

We have started our final week at the dig. This week will be so busy that things will get frantic at times. All the bustle is caused by the two main activities during this period.

First, Jessica will lead the students to finish all their excavation record-keeping. This includes all the steps that they don't show on CSI- drafting profile and plan drawings of excavation units, making final photographs of each unit, writing draft reports about the stratigraphic layers and features in each excavation area, and finishing initial artifact processing, cataloging, and inventory so the bags can be packed and transported back to Michigan Tech's Industrial Archaeology Lab.

During all the recording and processing, we'll also have lots of visitors to the site and several public programming activities. This is the best time to visit a dig, since we are at the maximum extent of excavation for the season. People can now see all the architecture and features that we've been able to expose. We kicked off our public programming last night with a talk in Parowan. I'll write more about that talk in a post soon. We have lectures and site tours all this week, including Michigan Tech Alumni today, a brown bag and lecture in Cedar City on Monday, then the Sons of the Utah Pioneers, the Boy Scouts, some type of event with visitors in town for the glider festival.

We will try to get more blog posts up

this weekend, and I am going to send students to the library so they can write. We have many interesting details to report. In the meantime, here are some photos of people and scenes from the dig and around Parowan:

Mark at the screen.

Jessica and Frank talking things over.
Andy brushing off masonry.
Mike starting his last unit.
Renée is now fearless with the mattock.

Me at the screen, helping with somebody's unit.

The desert has been in bloom for weeks now. This has been such a cool and moist summer, any plants that can flower have been blooming for weeks. I've been saving pictures of flowers and will post an entire blog entry with those pics!

The weather has given us some sublime scenes. Here is one looking north from Parowan toward Beaver.
Parowan is full of farms and ranches. We have become used to having our morning commute delayed by cattle or sheep drives. The ranchers are moving their herds to summer pastures in the mountains, passing our camp on their trip.

Scholarships announced

2009-06-11T10:30:00.003-05:00

The Register of Professional Archaeologists awarded two scholarships to students participating in the Utah Pottery Project/Michigan Technological University field school at the Davenport Pottery Site in Parowan, Utah. Each of the sponsoring organizations makes an award and the Society for Historical Archaeology selected our field project among the other RPA certified field schools.

Congratulations to Samantha Foss and Michael Estep! The RPA announcement is here.

Michigan Tech Alumni Event!

2009-06-10T11:28:00.003-05:00

A Day in the Field with MTU’s Industrial Archaeologists!

The Department of Social Sciences is pleased to invite Michigan Tech alumni and friends to visit our archaeology dig in Parowan, Utah. On June 20th, please come to see the important discoveries, including the well-preserved remains of one of the first non-Native pottery shops in the southern expanse of the Utah Territory. Alumni and friends could put these events at the center of a weekend trip through Utah's beautiful and historic Color and Canyon Country!

MTU faculty, students, and volunteers are excavating the site of the pottery shop established by Thomas and Sarah Davenport in 1852. These English factory workers spent nearly a decade struggling to solve technical problems, then operated their shop successfully over forty years. MTU excavation teams have unearthed several extraordinary features, including well-preserved building foundations, heaps of kiln failures, and the first English-style updraft kiln ever excavated west of the Mississippi river.

After touring the site and talking with project team members in Parowan, the group will meet at the Iron Mission State Park Museum in nearby Cedar City, Utah. At the museum, Dr. Scarlett will take the group through the exhibit, Potters of the Gathering: Clay Work in Early Utah. The exhibit includes more than 200 objects, both antique and archaeological, along with DVD video and audio programs that illustrate the successes and failures of the immigrant clay workers.

Following the pottery exhibit, the tour will consider the history of iron mining and smelting in Southern Utah. MTU industrial archaeologists and Utah State Parks staff will preview the museum’s new exhibits about residents’ efforts to make iron in the 1850s, including a full-scale replica of the blast furnace. Then the group will head west of Cedar City to Old Iron Town State Park, an industrial ruin where workers smelted iron in the 1860s. The furnace, casting house, charcoal ovens, and other industrial ruins are potential sites for archaeological fieldwork during the summer of 2010 (pictures here).

Schedule and Rendezvous:
9:00 AM – 12:00 PM: Open visits to excavations at the pottery site and local museum in Parowan, Utah.
Site location: 75 West 100 South, Parowan, Utah, 84761

1:00 PM – 2:00 PM: Guided tour of Potters of the Gathering at the Iron Mission State Park Museum in Cedar City, Utah.
Museum location: 585 North Main St., Cedar City, Utah 84720

2:30 PM: Overview of iron industry history, view of exhibits, caravan departs.

3:30 PM – 5:00 PM: Visit to Old Iron Town State Park.
From Cedar City head west on Hwy U-56 for approximately 20 miles. Turn south onto Old Iron Town Rd. Travel this gravel road for approximately five miles to the ruins located on the left hand side

Michigan Technological University Alumni and Friends can register here.

We're on TV!

2009-06-08T22:22:00.003-05:00

KCSG ran their story tonight! They did a great job editing. It was so windy the day that Stephanie shot her film, I didn't think they would be able to use any audio at all. The story is here.

Press Coverage

2009-06-07T11:25:00.007-05:00

At the end of the week, we spent time with reporters from the regional newspaper and TV stations. The first article has appeared in The Spectrum, the regional paper that covers St. George, Cedar City, and southwest Utah. The Spectrum also published a story about opening of Potters of the Gathering: Clay Work in Early Utah at the Iron Mission State Park Museum. Nur Kausar wrote both stories and I have received emails that remark on how much people enjoyed her writing.

A reporter/camerawoman also came from KCSG, the regional NBC affiliate. We don't have a TV in our field camp, so we don't know if they broadcast the story yet. Stephanie told us to watch the website, so I'm keeping an eye on things and will post the link if they story appears. The NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City might run that story, so I'm also keeping an eye on KSL.com.

If you are just visiting this blog for the first time, you can read about the excavations at the Davenport Pottery by clicking here. This research is a public archaeology project and is entirely funded by tax-deductible donations. Even small donations will help our work-- $20 buys one sample of clay or ceramic isotope fingerprinting, for example. Please give by clicking here. If you would like to see a list of needs and a summary of how the fieldwork was sponsored, please click here.

The press exposure and spreading with word of mouth in town has meant that we've had many more people coming out to visit the dig and see our discoveries for themselves. I think everyone who visits the dig leaves impressed-- the tremendous detail in what we have discovered impresses them. We welcome people to come to the site whenever we are present. If you are planning a trip to the area and would like to see our dig, I published the work schedule here.

Several people in town have adopted my students, bringing them occasional treats during visits. In the picture below, the students are all enjoying cold sodas brought over by our neighbor Mr. Denhalter. We appreciate all the cookies, muffins, and other treats. This may be the first dig on which I've gained weight while working!

Everyone on the project wants our readers to know what a warm and wonderful town Parowan is and how much we are enjoying our time here. Yesterday was the town's classic car show. The entire community is getting ready for a huge glider festival during June and July. We are starting to see gliders arrive on trailers and are excited to entice the people who love the sky with the allure of what we find underground!

Work, Other than the Kiln

2009-06-07T09:48:00.010-05:00

The project team has moved a lot of dirt besides that over the kiln. This is a general description of other work at the site. In the coming days, students and volunteers will write about their work on the blog. These pictures and maps should allow the blog's readers to orient themselves to the site's layout. If this is your first visit to the blog, before reading further, you might check out the map discussion and my comments about Mrs. Carol Wright.

Below are a photo of the Davenport

's 1890s home and site on the adjoining lot (viewer's right). The second image is a plan of the site on which I have drawn a map of our discoveries over the geophysics data. I drew symbols that represent brick and stone masonry and foundations. The black lines represent the 2 meter square grid that we mapped over the entire site to control our excavation record keeping.

The maps shows three major sets of features. Kiln A is drawn as a green circle with some bricks drawn to show orientation. I have outlined the other buildings and features using black-shaded boxes. Looking at our discoveries, consider the following passage from Emma Cynthia Nielson's The Development of Pioneer Pottery in Utah (1961: 101-104):

"On Nov. 18, 1961, Mrs. Luella Adams, the wife of

Thomas Adams, described the pottery as she

remembered it. We went out on the back porch

of the home and looked over the yard.

There was one old tree left from pioneer time,

but everything else had been taken down and removed

from the place. Mrs. Adams said that the pottery

consisted of three log buildings which stood back in the lot

and southwest of the present home.

The building on the south held the clay;

the next one was the factory; it housed the wheel.

The third room was used to store the pots for drying.

There was a basement midway between the home and the

factory where the potter had his kiln."

Mrs. Adams's description helps us to understand the remains we have discovered so far. We have found one kiln, the light foundation of a twentieth century shed or barn, a stone foundation for a much heavier building, and the cellar pit mentioned by Mrs. Adams.

While kiln A was the first discovered by Samantha and Renée, I do not think it was the first kiln built by the Davenports. It is made of quality firebrick, which would have been very hard to find in 1853. If the Davenports used firebrick in the first kiln, I expect it would have been used to line the inside of a structure otherwise built of locally quarried stone. We are still looking for the other two kilns described in family histories.

While investigating the strong magnetic anomaly south of kiln A, Samantha, Mark, and Mike uncovered heavy stone foundations. These courses of stone may be part of a single structure, including a small piece of foundation wall that I discovered during my excavations back in 2000. That bit of foundation inspired my theory that the entire site was well preserved and worthy of intensive study. This is a very heavy foundation, nearly three feet deep. These stones were built to support something much more substantial than a small log cabin! We are still debating why the Davenports built this building.

Andy was examining the anomaly in 6W42S when he discovered a deep pit. We all think this pit is probably the cellar mentioned by Mrs. Adams in 1961. In this picture, you can see the pit as Andy first saw it-- the northern 1/2 is black sediment full of charcoal. The southern 1/2 of the unit is the orange clayey loam that we think was the ground under the topsoil in 1852 when the Davenport's started building their pottery.

During excavation, Andy discovered that the charcoal deposit was just the first layer in a deep and stratified pit feature. The Davenport's dug into the subsoil and built the cellar, then through time they filled it with layers of soil and rubbish. You can see the profile after excavation in this picture:

While Andy patiently excavated each stratigraphic layer in the cellar, he realized that for a time, the Davenports used the cellar as a disposal area for pots that failed in the kiln. Andy found busted fragments of pottery. Lots and lots of fragments of pottery. Nine five-gallon buckets filled with sherds the size of quarters, nickels, and dimes. Other fragments were larger, including the warped and cracked crock bottom in Andy's lap in this picture:

Andy's most interesting observation so far is about the nature of the deposit. While carefully removing the fragments, he noticed that many of the larger fragments were actually stacked as they had been in the kiln. Spurs, a kind of kiln furniture like a stilt, separated each pot or pan from those above or below. From this observation, Andy concluded that some of this deposit was from a catastrophic failure in the kiln. The potters carried entire stacks of crocks that had failed in the kiln and threw them into the cellar hole. Some of the spurs he recovered are in this picture:

We are not yet certain if all the broken pots, pans, jugs, and jars in the cellar feature are from a single catastrophic event or if the Davenports threw things into the cellar over the decades of operation. We will try to figure that out during analysis.

Looking at buckets and buckets and buckets of tiny broken ceramic fragments is a constant reminder of how badly we need support for the upcoming lab work. I will use your tax deductible donations to support students working in the lab and for the scientific tests for their research projects. If you are interested in learning more about how we put this project together, click here. To make a donation to the Michigan Tech Fund into an account for the Utah Pottery Project, please click here.

Pictures and Holiday

2009-06-03T18:40:00.003-05:00

Today marks just about half way through our field season! We are in the middle of a break and the students are on holiday, driving among the beautiful landscapes of southern Utah. We start excavation again on Friday. I thought this was an opportune time to put up a few pictures of the site showing the total extent of our excavations.

This picture is of the first kiln we discovered, showing the full extent of recent excavations. Frank and Brandon opened a second unit adjoining the south side of the square that Renée and Samantha have dug. They have exposed more of the kiln's floor, but we are puzzled because they have not uncovered part of the exterior wall and flue system, and we haven't found the fireboxes or kiln door. We have more digging to do before we fully understand this kiln!

The next image looks south over the 6 meter long trench that we've dug north of the first kiln. You can see a pair of stone foundations that Samantha, Mark, and Mike have exposed. The foundations are substantial and the artifact preservation in the units is extraordinary. I have a theory about the purpose of this building, but I'm withholding speculations until we have a little more evidence.

The final photo shows an overall view looking south toward the mountains. The wide angle lens distorts the image, making the mountains look small and the site narrow, but it captures the arrangements of the excavation units.

In my next post, I'll describe how the pieces of the puzzle are starting to fit together. Readers might notice that the students have been signing up as coauthors on the blog. I hope some of them will start making posts next week, telling what they've learned about their discoveries and the process and practice of public archaeology.

The Davenports in England, 5-28 update!

2009-05-28T21:46:00.008-05:00

The journey of this research is taking two basic routes. First through the sciences, we expect to make discoveries about landscape learning, technology transfer, adaptation, and creativity. At the same time, we are telling the story of the Davenports, their immigration, and the lives they built in their Utah community. A deeply humanistic story, adding to the great pastiche of the human experience.

Key to both these areas of research is knowing the how the Davenports' story started in Brampton, England. This information matters because the scientists and engineers won't necessarily recognize how the Davenports adapted if we don't understand what they knew about potting before they left England. Nor can we understand the world the Davenports lived in and the choices they made in their lives if we don't understand where their story began.

I am very lucky to have found Anne-Marie Knowles during this past year. She is a curator at the Chesterfield Museum and Art Gallery in Northern Derbyshire, England. She has been researching the Davenports in England. After considerable effort, she believes she has really nailed down where the Davenports lived. By studying the 1841 census and comparing the Davenports neighbors with other records, she is pretty certain that they lived in what is now called 'Stone Row.' The name derives from a row of stone cottages that were incorporated into shops that now face on the Chatsworth Road in Brampton. The building in which they lived is now part of a store very near the site of the Welshpool & Payne pottery owned by Matthew Knowles. This is really exciting, because it means that the picture she sent me shows the workroom in that shop, perhaps the very wheels at which Thomas and Sarah worked.

Their house was probably a cottage, but it may have had adjoining structures and looked a great deal like one of these two photos of nearby places. Keep in mind when viewing these pictures that Brampton was a small country town in the 1840s with a few factories and small communities. The buildings would have been in much better condition just after being built:

More that just that, Ms. Knowles thinks that Thomas Davenport probably worked as a thrower, and not just as a laborer in the factory. I wrote before about how the census identified Thomas as a "Pot M." We speculated that it could mean maker or manager. Ms. Knowles thinks that because the same census worker also listed "Pot Lab," meaning laborer, and "Pot Burner," referring to kiln workers, it stands to reason that "Pot M" meant "pot maker."

Since nineteenth century pottery making was a technological system, not just a series of skills or techniques, the Davenports jobs confirm the basis for all of my hypotheses and justifications for the archaeological study. These individuals had no experience building or burning kilns, making glazes, or finding and processing raw clay. Even masterful skills at a process like throwing on the wheel does not assure someone success when every other part of the technical system has changed.

If our luck continues with our discoveries, I'll have much more to say on this subject!

Please help support our research

2009-05-26T09:49:00.011-05:00

After some conversations with visitors to the site over this holiday weekend, I realized that I needed to explain our project's funding and the urgent need for support. This is a public archaeology project. The research is dependent upon tax-deducible gifts from private individuals who discover our work and decide that what we are doing is important and should continue.

Many people seem to be under the impression that a patron or foundation is sponsoring our work at the Davenport Pottery Site in Parowan, Utah. To be blunt, people think we have a sugar daddy. This is not true and it is important that people understand how this project came into being- archaeology research doesn't "just happen."

I have cobbled together enough support to run the field school. Several partners or patrons are helping, mostly through in-kind donations of logistical support. I thought I would give readers an idea of what it takes to make a field school happen:

The Iron Mission State Park Museum is making most of our photocopies and letting us bring the students there for lectures. In addition Todd Prince, the park director, and Ryan Paul, the curator, have both given guest lectures or led field trips, teaching the students about Iron County prehistory and history. Todd has extensive experience in Utah prehistory and stands ready to help us with the consultation process if we discover any prehistoric remains.

The City of Parowan and The Dixie National Forest worked together to get us a waiver so we could camp in the Five Mile Picnic Area at no cost. The camp or hotel fees are a big part of field work expenses, so this support was critical. Parowan City staff have also been very helpful because they found us a secure storage location, give us access to potable water, help with equipment for specific field needs, and are keeping up the campground.

The archaeology faculty and staff at Southern Utah University's Archaeological Repository lent us a bunch of equipment for our field camp, including some extra tents, cooking gear, and potable water tanks. I am in debt to both Barbara Frank and Emily Dean for their help.

Utah State Parks will lend us some equipment and help with back filling and earth moving.

The Matheson family have given us permission to work on their land and promised to donate the artifact collection to the state.

Michigan Technological University awarded me a small grant that will cover about 1/2 of the vehicle costs from the motor pool. The Department of Social Sciences is also supporting some of the students during their time here, through small scholarships or hourly pay, and helped cover some of Chuck Young's travel costs to come out and bring the geophysics equipment. Chuck paid the balance out of his pocket. The department also let me teach the field school class, despite the fact that enrollment was well below the cut-off point that makes a class viable.

The Register of Professional Archaeologists also provided a scholarship award to the project. This helped students to enroll who might not have otherwise been able to afford to attend.

The Utah Humanities Council awarded State Parks a small grant to help us tie the exhibit and the excavation together in some public programs.

That is how we made the field school happen.

The analysis and write up of this excavation and the ongoing research are separate issues. We will return to our lab at MTU with tens of thousands of artifacts to analyze and research to complete. Without any donations or support, I will spend the next ten years studying the collection and writing a manuscript, working on occasional Sundays and during future months of August. I will not return to the field in Utah again until that is finished. It would be unethical for me to collect more excavation data without reporting on what we'd already gathered.

With your gifts of support, however, we could finish the analysis in a year, help the Iron Mission Museum design their replica exhibit of the Davenport Pottery for the Ironworks Homestead, and set up another study in Parowan or another pottery site. The key to making this happen is gifts in support of student scholarships and analysis. As you read in the list above, lots of organizations can give in-kind and logistical support. None of the organizations with which I've partnered can support students working in the lab. We are looking for partners to join us in our research effort by supporting students and other direct costs. The partners could be communities, businesses, or private patrons who wish to ensure that the archaeological study of Utah's historic-era pottery heritage continues before more of the sites are destroyed.

The way that the Industrial Heritage and Archaeology program at Michigan Tech operates, we find sponsors that support our students while the faculty donate our time to various research projects. We collaborate in this way. I don't get paid out of donations from the public-- the university already pays me to teach students and do research, so I don't need money for my salary. We use your donations to support graduate and undergraduate students and direct research costs (gas for the truck and van, Neutron Activation Analysis and other archaeometry, etc.)

Here are some things for which I need immediate support:

If I can find support for Jessica Montcalm, she can work on this project full time as her MS thesis, instead of waiting on tables or holding another part time job while finishing her studies- M.S. student tuition waiver, 2009-10- $12,000

To get the lab work going, we need funds to support undergraduates working in the lab. They help Jessica and me with the cleaning, cataloging, refitting studies (pottery jigsaw puzzles), and other analyses- Undergraduate student lab staff- $5,000

Vehicles cost us money when we take them from the Motor Pool. Right now, I am on the hook for gas and rental costs- $1,500

The science costs money. Neutron Activation Analysis, analysis of animal bones, charcoal identification, LA-ICP-MS all cost about $20, $50, or $100 per sample- Scientific testing:- $2,000

Every little gift helps! Your gift of $20 lets me buy one scientific test. For example, I might be able to compare the chemistry of Thomas Davenport's raw clay and his finished products, or study the charcoal to determine what type of fuel burned to heat the kiln.

Gifts at any level are tax deductible.

Donations can be made to a special account at the Michigan Tech Fund by clicking here. Individuals who wish to give money to organizations in Utah can make donations by sending checks to the Iron Mission Museum Foundation (Davenport Pottery Project), 585 North Main, Cedar City, Utah 84720-1079.

I offer my deepest thanks our past supporters, including the students who invested their time and finances in the research.

Math problem, Part 2

2009-05-26T08:15:00.009-05:00

Several people sent me comments about my math word problem. In the original post, I asked people how to calculate the diameter of a circle when I only had a chord. I set up the word problem with this diagram of the kiln wall:

We thought about the problem a bit, but couldn't recall any formulas for a circle that didn't require one to know the radius, diameter, or circumference as terms of the equation. I did remember that the solution involved making two right triangles along the arc. While eating my peanut butter sandwich, I decided that I could use the two right triangles to get a quick and dirty solution. I knew I could draw the two triangles at scale and cut them out. Then I could use a set of circles drawn at the same scale and slide the triangles over the concentric circles until I found the best fit. This sort of the way we calculate the rim diameters of ceramic fragments.

We all knew that our math friends would remember the equations, however.

Pete and Mark Dice phoned in an answer. Pete promised to send me his figures by email.

C. Crosse commented on the blog. She said, "Given that c is a straight line between two points on the circumference of a circle--X and Z--which is called the cord, the curved line would be called arc XZ. Assuming you know c (not XZ) and m--the height of the arc created by the chord--then the formula would be:

r = (m² + ¼c²)/2m

Pete Foss made a comment on the project Facebook page:

"I found a circle calculator here:

http://www.1728.com/circsect.htm

that says your kiln was 1.88 meters in radius. 12 feet in diameter."

He added, "Hooray for Google!"

Indeed. The page that Pete sent includes a useful illustration:

I'd still like to hear from one of my friends that are math teachers! We have marked out a circle of 12 feet on the ground surface. As we excavate more of the kiln, we will be able to get more accurate measurements. Family oral history said that the kilns were "about 14 feet across" and that there may be three or four of them all in the back yard. We'll see what we find out.

May 28, 2009- update.

I have heard from my friend Kristin Z. Cook, who teaches math at a high school in Milwaukee. She ran the numbers and said: "I am assuming the perpendicular segment you drew bisects the 1.8-meter segment. If that is the case, then I calculated the radius to be approximately 1.8759 m, the diameter to be 3.7517 m, and the circumference to be 11.7864 m." She promised to scan and email me her a page that showed her work. She is a math teacher, after all!

My colleague Steve Walton also worked up a solution, but not to be outdone by others, he formatted a diagram and included it in his email:

So there is pretty wide agreement that the kiln is between 12 and 12.5 feet in diameter. Pretty close to the 14 feet diameter recorded in oral histories and given the inaccuracies of our measurements, we need to leave a little wiggle room in our conclusions.

If you are curious, here is how I figured out my estimate. I drew copies of sets of right triangles using a scale. The right triangles split the chord evenly in half. I new that I could make a second set of overlapping triangles on a second overlapping chord, then line up both sets on a scale drawing. If I projected their short side as in the drawing below, I knew they would intersect in the middle of the circle and allow me to measure the radius! I always liked geometry proofs more than algebraic ones....

Kiln pics

2009-05-25T15:23:00.002-05:00

We have dug about as far as we can on the kiln. Before we go any further, we must open up another unit to expose more foundation surface.

In these photos, you are seeing the kiln floor. Beneath the floor, on which pottery sat during firing, there is a system of arched or vaulted flues moving hot air as well as fire boxes where the Davenports could add wood or coal.

We will see.

I promise to write more about the other units soon.

Mobile blog post

Digging after the rain.

2009-05-24T10:06:00.004-05:00

We are back at work after an evening of record-setting rain. We had to quit a bit early yesterday as some thunderstorm cells moved over Parowan. Most of the crew went up to camp at about 3:45 as the storm blew in. Jessica, Guy and I stayed behind to wait out the rain with our volunteers. Kirk, Ester, and India Henrichsen came down to work with us yesterday and their work went beyond the call of duty when they shoveled and screened through the rain.

This morning is beautiful, as shown by this picture of Frank at the screen. The only camp problem brought on by the rain overnight concerned poor Renée, who cheerfully announced to the rest of us that she now has a waterbed in her tent.

Renée and Samantha are finishing their drawing of the kiln, now fully exposed and cleaned up in their unit:

Yesterday while everyone was digging, I spent some more time with Chuck Young's magnetometer maps. I scaled his maps and plotted Renée and Sam's discovery on top of it. In my drawing, the black box represents their 2x2 meter excavation unit. The white circle represents a general guess about the kiln size. The point of my efforts was to try and figure out how well the geophysical map captured what we have found in the ground. This type of effort is generally called "ground truthing" in remote sensing:

As you can see, I think we have a remarkable match between the image and the discoveries. Keep in mind that the red and blue colors are the opposite poles of a magnetic field (the north and south). If you were in school and even did the experiment where you shake iron filings onto a piece of paper with a magnet underneath, you can imagine the blue and red as the two different sides of the magnetic field that become visible in the filings.

Chuck Young is still working on the data, refining his initial map that I used above. He has sent me a draft of the new map, which I rescaled and drew upon. You can see the magnetic field of what is probably a second kiln just north (below) of the current kiln on the plot below:
So my current theory is that there are two kilns, side by side on the north-south axis here, each with blue-red poles. In order to find out if the map really shows the location of another kiln, we put in units to the north of Renée and Samantha. Pictured here:
The Henrichsens helped us shovel-scrape the plowzone yesterday during the rain. Michael is working in these units now and he will start excavating 1/2 of these three 2/2 meter units. We hope that he will come across the top of the second kiln.

I'll try to write more later today about the other excavation units.

We enjoyed a BBQ last night as Parowan residents kicked off the holiday weekend. Everyone back in the Midwest will be glad to know that the cook prepared some excellent brats along with lots of other delicious food. The students were grateful to be graciously hosted for such a terrific dinner. I hope that everyone from dinner comes out to the site soon so they can see what we are doing in the heart of their town!

We are in the process of signing up the students so that they can write entries for the blog. Hopefully we'll have that set up before the holiday is over.

Rainy afternoon

2009-05-23T16:59:00.001-05:00

We're having a bit of rain on the dig this afternoon.

Mobile blog post

We were right...

2009-05-22T15:40:00.004-05:00

It is definitely the first pottery kiln. A major discovery, since this is the first English style kiln excavated by archaeologists from the country between Denver and the Pacific coast of California. Maybe even as far east as Tennessee, Minnesota, or Kentucky.

Renée and Samantha are still working to expose the arc of brick:

Sam is happy to be cleaning the sidewalls in preparation for a photo!

We spent lunch talking about how to calculate the diameter of a circle when you can only measure a chord along the arc. This is a particular question for the mathletes out there. I've worked out a solution in the tradition of pragmatic field archaeology, but if somebody thinks they can be more accurate, let me know!

The chord is 1.80 meters long measured from the outside edge. Making a 90° angle and measuring at 0.90 meter gives a triangle side that measures 0.23 meter. A real world word problem!

email or post your solution! Show your work for partial credit...

Major discovery?

2009-05-18T13:19:00.001-05:00

Renée and Samantha may have just made a major discovery! Are these bricks the very top edge of a round pottery kiln wall?

We are about to break for lunch, but we'll know more by the end of the day! Stay Tuned!

Mobile blog post

Preservation and Stimulus

2009-05-18T11:00:00.004-05:00

Today is our last work day before the students and team members get a three day holiday break to do their wash, rest from our hard work, and explore some more of beautiful southern Utah. I will post a summary of the week's discoveries later today.

Someone emailed me today with some questions about preservation, archaeology, and economic development. I have been talking to many people about how public archaeology can be an ally of economic development. Here in Utah and most western states, archaeology and cultural resource management are often seen as obstructions to development. While I don't expect that archaeologists and developers will agree on everything all the time, I believe strongly that archaeology can be a key ally to economic development. I've written about this before.

Today, the Society for Historical Archaeology and other similar organizations are making the case for historic preservation as part of economic stimulus funds. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation has posted a set of articles that show the benefits that preservation have for economic development and growth. You can find the links to these studies here. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is collating information from many professional societies and organizations. You can find it all organized here.

Photo update

2009-05-17T16:36:00.001-05:00

Mobile blog post

Quality Pics, Field School Dig, Week 1

2009-05-17T14:48:00.004-05:00

I had a chance this morning during work to download the first round of photos from the dig camera. I thought I would post a few pics here of a higher quality than those I've taken with my iPhone camera. I love my iPhone, but it isn't as cool as our Nikon!

Learning to feel sand, silt, and clay, or even clayey loam:

Pictures of Grid 42 South, 18 West.

First, the opening shot:
Then after the first level was removed, leaving a suspicious pile of stone in setu and exposing level 2- a much redder sediment.
After working in level 2 for a little bit, exposing a foundation for a light wooden framed building:

Some pics of people doing geophysics with Chuck Young and other dig related tasks:

A very big thanks to Chuck Young and to the Social Sciences department at MTU for sponsoring Chuck's trip out to help us with the remote sensing survey!

NPR Story, Part 3

2009-05-17T14:47:00.003-05:00

The KUER Newsroom has fixed the link to the radio story about our project! You can now listen to the story here:

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kuer/news/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1505759&sectionID=1

Thanks to the people at KUER for their efforts to fix the problem!

Camp Life, Day 6

2009-05-16T21:23:00.004-05:00

We have all pretty much settled into our field camp. Several parents have asked me to post the address where they can send mail:

Addressee Name

General Delivery

Michigan Tech Archaeology

Parowan, UT 84761

The camp is beautiful and although I could see my breath this morning while I was making my coffee, I enjoy the early morning hours. I wake up with a pair of woodpeckers who start searching for bugs at about 6 am.

Some of the students have grouped their tents together, while others are spread further apart. We also have a kitchen area with a large table and good fire ring. After warm day on the dig, everybody has a hot shower and shares dinner. About twice per week, we have discussions or lab time in the evenings.

I rigged up a shower for the students, using some gear borrowed from Southern Utah University's archaeology lab, a large tarp, and some ropes. The students realized that they need to add cold water to their solar shower bags before using them each evening, just as I had promised to Michigan undergraduates skeptical of the camp technology. Two pictures of our shower are below.
The sun breaks on the Vermillion Cliffs just as we come down in the morning on our way to the site!

We hope to finish excavating the plow zone tomorrow and begin working in nineteenth century deposits. Stay tuned!

Topsoil and Plowzone

2009-05-16T14:22:00.006-05:00

Today is our second day excavating at the Davenport Pottery Site in Parowan, Utah. Guided by the magnetometer survey and a surface survey, we have begun a two meter wide excavation trench across what we believe to be the kiln area. We are excavating the trench in two meter squares. You can see a picture of them here:

My field assistant Jessica Montcalm is the person leaning out of the picture (so she thought!)

Mike and Frank are working in the western-most unit, on the edge of the plowed field and have the first indication of architectural rubble.
Two meters east are Renée and Samantha. They are working through the center of the hotspot in the magnetometry map.

We set up datum points by each excavation unit, so they can compare the depth at which soil, features, and artifacts appear in all the different units. The sediment levels in the field seem to be very level.

We are already starting to find clues about production. This little ceramic sphere seems to be a little bit of kiln furniture. It was flattened just a bit on the top and bottom and the glaze ran onto one end during the firing.

Many people from town have come and see us at the site, but nobody is as happy as the robins that live in the trees and bushes next door. They are thrilled that we're digging and mixing up the leaf and grass mulch dumped in the field. As each team leaves their unit to go to the screens and process their dirt, the robins swoop in and eat all the grubs and worms they can find in the dig unit! Then they fly away and wait for more digging to reveal more goodies. You can just see one in the picture below. I'll try to get a better picture with the digital camera.

This afternoon we broke early and packed up from the site. We went down to Cedar City to the Iron Mission State Park Museum, where Todd Prince spoke to us about Utah prehistory. Todd is the Park Manager at the Iron Mission State Park and an archaeologist with years of experience studying Utah's prehistory. After talking with Todd and seeing the replica wiki ups on the museum grounds, we drove out to study the famous petroglyphs at the Parowan Gap. You can see some photos and read a discussion about the archaeoastronomy at the site here:

http://www.parowan.org/city/pgap/

Project in the News- NPR Story

2009-05-14T08:48:00.004-05:00

This morning, KUER 90.1, Utah Public Radio, did a wonderful story about the Utah Pottery Project, the Davenport family, and public archaeology. Jennifer Napier-Pearce spoke with some of the people involved in the exhibit and archaeology project.

I hope lots of people will come to see the exhibit before it closes at the end of July. I also hope people will come to visit us during the fieldwork. Unlike so many archaeology digs, this one is right in downtown Parowan across the street from the Old Rock Church Museum and just about 15 minutes from Cedar City and the exhibit at the Iron Mission State Park Museum.

As I wrote once before, this is a public archaeology project. No federal or state regulations force people to participate. The people who help with the project do so because they care about the history of Utah's clay artisans, contributing either as researchers, as landowners, or as donors and patrons supporting field and lab work and student research.

The Davenport Pottery Site in Parowan is an excellent example of the collaborations. After a decade preparing for this dig, we'll study the site to develop a detailed understanding of how the Davenports built their kilns, prepared their clays, formed their wares, and so on. With the newly discovered information, we will design an operating replica of the pottery shop that can be built at the Iron Mission State Park Museum to tell the one of the stories of Iron County's industries during the nineteenth century.

Our work relies upon the tax-deductible support of individuals who care about the Utah's history and heritage. We need donations right now to support lab analyses, supporting student researchers in their contributions to the study. Donations can be made to either the Iron Mission State Park Museum Foundation or on-line to the Michigan Tech Fund, into an account designated for the Utah Pottery Project. Click here to make a gift:

https://www.banweb.mtu.edu/mtu/mtf/giftform.xsql?desig=E01112-Utah%20Pottery%20Proj-DeptSocSci-Scarlett

Geophysics and Family History

2009-05-13T17:41:00.004-05:00

Here are the results of today's magnetometry survey!

In 2000, I interviewed Mrs. Carol Wright in Parowan. Mrs. Wright is Thomas and Sarah Davenport's granddaughter. She was born in 1908, which means she is 100 years old this year. Thomas Davenport died in 1888, twenty years before she was born. Her father had worked in the pottery as a youngster, however, and she remembered the general description of the property even though the old adobe home and workshop buildings had been torn down before she was born.

Below you can make a side-by-side comparison between the sketch I made with Mrs. Wright and the map of magnetic anomalies.

I marked areas of interest to our excavation on the magnetic image below:

Based upon the magnetic anomalies, we think the basic description of the kilns' location and sizes are pretty accurate. Family histories say that they were "about fourteen feet across." There were several, perhaps three or four lined up in the back. We are going to locate our excavation trench to expose one side of the kilns. We'll leave the other side for future archaeologists, since they will certainly be better scientists than we are today.

We have begun surface collections of the site, grid by grid. I expect we will start excavations on Friday.

Stay tuned!

Grids and gear!

2009-05-13T12:38:00.004-05:00

We are underway in Parowan! The students all arrived by Sunday and we set up camp at the Five Mile Picnic Area. On the site this week, we set up the grid that will allow us to collect X, Y, and Z coordinates on all the data we gather during the dig.

Chuck Young is visiting with us today. He is a retired geophysicist at Michigan Tech. The Social Science department helped send Dr Young out to survey the site with us and teach the students about the Magnetometer.

The reason I asked Dr. Young to bring the Magnetometer is that we hope to see below the ground surface before we start excavation. We only have six weeks to dig. We really need to focus on the pottery-related features like the kilns. The magnetometer reads localized variations in magnetic fields as things interfere with the pattern of the earth's general one. Things like campfires burned in clayey dirt develop very strong magnetic anomalies. Something like a pottery kiln foundation should show up very clearly like a bright spot on the mapped readings.

At least, we expect so.

We are talking data right now and I will post a map of the readings later today!

The team on one of our first field trips. This one was about Iron County history. They are climbing on an electric shovel from one of the twentieth century iron mines on the west side of the valley.

One picture of field camp!

Mobile blog post

From the Copper Country to the Color Country

2009-05-08T11:32:00.005-05:00

The field school students are all on the road!

Two vehicles left from Michigan Technological University this week, carrying people and gear for the dig. Our incoming graduate students have left from their home states in order to rendezvous in Parowan, Utah, this Sunday. We also have some people arriving by plane at the Las Vegas airport. We'll start work on Monday morning, bright and early. The experience will be interesting for the MTU students, who are traveling from Michigan's Copper Country to Utah's Color Country.

Michigan Tech is on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, on the south shore of Lake Superior. The Keweenaw Peninsula juts out into the lake and includes the former grandeur of the copper mine and mill towns like Calumet, Houghton, and Hancock. The copper deposits of the Keweenaw Peninsula were famous all over the world, as were the mines and immigrants came from all over the world to work in the mines, mills, and logging camps. After decline during the twentieth century, the copper country is rural today and the economy relies upon tourism. 'Downstaters' visit during the winter for our 350 inches of annual snow and our Winter Carnival celebration. People also visit during the summer and fall, when the big lake keeps us cool during the hot Midwestern July and August and when our leaves start to turn in the fall.

Of course, Iron County is part of Utah's Color Country. The history of Iron County is similar in many ways to Michigan's Keweenaw. The draw of iron mining and other related industries drew immigrants, in the context of the Latter-day Saint settlement. The iron mines and furnaces cycled through boom and bust, leading to a decline in the mid-twentieth century. Iron County is rural today, between larger cities and communities on the Wasatch Front to the north and St. George and Las Vegas to the south. The economy is diversified, but tourism plays an important part. Visitors come for the skiing in the winter and camping and hiking in the summer, enjoying the communities proximity to Cedar Breaks National Monument, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, and many other eco- and heritage tourism attractions amid southern Utah's stunning polychrome geology. Cedar City's Utah Shakespeare Festival runs from summer into the fall, and like MTU's Winter Carnival, it attracts guests and encourages families to come year after year.

Another similarity is that both communities are small, with 10,000 to 15,000 people in the cities and good universities (Michigan Tech and Southern Utah University). Despite the small size, the former industrial booms mean that lots and lots of people have family history tied to the area. I am constantly meeting people when I travel who tell me, "Oh, Houghton! My Grandfather worked there." or "I have an ancestor from Parowan who then moved to northern Arizona." Houghton and Hancock share some of Parowan's famous claim to be a Mother Town from which individuals and groups of immigrants struck out to other places in the United States.

As an afterthought, both regions also have great traditions of local music. Check out these musicians:
Houghton's Hanna Bethel just posted a video on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8S5dSaz6cA&feature=player_embedded
and our own Eric Koskinen, although he now lives in Minneapolis:
http://www.erikkoskinen.com/

You can find great music in Cedar City at Groovacious Records:
http://www.groovacious.com/
and live at The Grind:
http://groovinatthegrind.com/

Exhibit Opening

2009-05-06T10:06:00.009-05:00

We opened Potters of the Gathering: Clay Work in Early Utah on Saturday, May 2. I am very grateful for all the help and support of everyone on the team at the Iron Mission State Park. We finished the last bits of exhibit preparation that morning, and my wife Sarah even joined the work team, despite the fact that she was on vacation from her job at the Chipstone Foundation and Milwaukee Art Museum. Sarah helped polish the acrylic boxes that cover the vitrines and then helped Ryan aim lights in the gallery.

I will post more quality photos of the exhibit as I get them. I was pretty busy Saturday night talking with visitors, so I didn't take any pictures myself.

We designed three main areas for the exhibit. The first area has the feel of a natural history museum. This area includes wall panels with text, photos and a touch-screen DVD, as well as cases of archaeological artifacts and an ambient audio program. This section of the exhibit explains the process of pottery manufacture, with emphasis on the English factory experience. It also presents the archaeological research into Utah's clay industries.

This case, as one example, is full of mold fragments from the Deseret Pottery site in Salt Lake City. Utah State Parks staff and groups of student volunteers did archaeological salvage at the site in 1977.
We built the second area of the exhibit in the style of an art museum. This section includes several cases that gather together examples of pottery that the maker stamped or signed. This is the largest collection of signed and identified pieces ever exhibited. In addition, this area also includes a large table display, pictured below, where a number of unsigned objects sit together. We hope that this display will encourage people to consider the aesthetic and technical variety in these objects and the similar diversity in the artisanal community that manufactured them.

The picture below shows the Eardley vitrine, which contains many of the Bedson Eardley and Deseret Pottery pieces in the show. In the background are panels that explore the push forces that encouraged potters to leave England for Utah.

Our third area is in the style of a history museum. We explain the potters' quality of life in this area, including health issues, business practices, and the social construction of identity. The displays, which include two pioneer period rooms, a peddling wagon, and a black-box theater, interpret objects using text panels and photographs and two separate audio programs.

Some local media covered our opening:

TheSpectrum.com from St. George, Utah.

I do hope lots of visitors will come to see the show while it is open at the Iron Mission State Park Museum. We have had some inquiries about hosting the show in other cities around Utah, but there is no guarantee the show will travel. The exhibit includes about 300 objects, most of which have never been exhibited before. It is certainly the largest collection of nineteenth century pottery ever gathered together. Besides all the objects, there are two audio programs, an ambient audio atmosphere, a touch-screen DVD with video segments, and dozens of historic and modern photographs.

After our opening, my wife and I took the remaining two days of her vacation time to do some camping and hiking in the desert's spring beauty. The wild plants are in bloom here, the days are warm, and the Coal Creek has swollen with snow melt runoff. My thoughts are increasingly turning to the fieldwork at the Davenport Pottery site. I'll post more exhibit pictures as soon as I get them, but will be write more soon about the field school and excavations! The students are on the road from MTU and should arrive in a day or two.

Downhill to the Opening

2009-04-24T20:30:00.004-05:00

We finished some major tasks this week, and I feel tired and satisfied. The exhibit panels, images, and video/audio elements were the biggest push, and Ryan and I got them all into production. Darrin and Benjamin at Mishap Studios finished the first set with us and the panels went to the print shop to be printed and mounted on foam core. Ryan and I picked up the first set of panels today, and we'll hang them tomorrow. In the photo below, Ryan and Rick Cleveland of Rainbow Sign and Banner are holding the exhibit's welcome sign.

I also spent time with Benjamin today, as we selected video and audio clips for different parts of the exhibit. I was again impressed by Mishap Studio's computer set up. They are working this weekend on the exhibit's touch-screen video.

Ryan will also work with Mishap to record the audio for our "black box theater." I am using this theater to allow people to hear the voice of Heber C. Kimball, a potter and pioneer Latter-day Saint. The narrator will read some of Kimball's sermons, while museum visitors sit in a darkened box with dramatically lit pottery.

I've finally finished painting vitrine bases. Just a few morning touch ups and then the paint can cure until we put ceramics on the bases and seal the acrylic boxes over top. It feels great to be done painting!

This week we also finished the exhibit booklet. I wrote an essay I think is unlike most exhibit catalogs. I didn't inventory the stuff in the show, but wrote instead about the Utah Pottery Project and the potters. I suppose the essay is a bit passionate, but I think most people who come to the show will understand. I hope the entire endeavor encourages people to think about Historical and Industrial Archaeology in Utah as well as cultural heritage generally.

Kudos to Stefanie Michaelson and Karen Krieger at Utah State Parks for their herculean efforts to edit the booklet and finish the beautiful design!

Mobile blog post

Object Photography

2009-04-21T18:48:00.006-05:00

I spent a bunch of time today working with Benjamin Howe of Mishap Studios, taking photographs of pottery objects that will be in our exhibit, Potters of the Gathering: Clay Work in Early Utah. We were taking photos for the small catalog booklet that Utah State Parks plans to publish for the exhibit. These are a preview of the photographs in the book and the objects that will be in the exhibit:

These are some of the items that will be on display May 2 through July 31.

Darrin, Ryan, and I finished the display panels and have taken them over to Rainbow Sign and Banner to be printed and mounted on thick foam core board. I spent some time this afternoon priming vitrine bases again. I expect to spend more time tomorrow painting them black and perhaps we'll be able to start putting objects into cases by the end of the week!

Schedule and Calendar, May and June 2009

2009-04-19T09:38:00.003-05:00

We hope that lots of people will be able to come visit us this summer. Both the museum exhibit and the archaeological excavation will be open to the public in May and June of 2009. The archaeological excavations at the Davenport Pottery site are open to the public whenever the archaeologists are on the site. We welcome visitors between 10 AM and 3 PM each day. Visitors will be able to walk around the site, see the dig in progress, and talk with the excavators, students, and volunteers about what they have learned through their discoveries.

Planned excavation calendar, May 11 through June 26:
May 11-18 working days, visitors welcome 10-3.
   Holiday May 19-21.
May 22-31 working days, visitors welcome 10-3.
   Holiday June 1-4.
June 5-14 working days, visitors welcome 10-3.
   Holiday June 15-17.
June 18-26 working days, visitors welcome 10-3.

Potters of the Gathering: Clay Work in Early Utah will be open at the Iron Mission State Park Museum in Cedar City, Utah, between May 2 and July 31. The museum is open seven days a week, 9 AM to 5 PM. Note that the exhibit will be open for a month following the end of our season’s excavations in Parowan.

This is our planed schedule, but please be aware that these times can change depending upon weather conditions and class needs. If we get hard rain, we’ll work in the lab or lead the students on a field trip.

While you are welcome to come visit us during our first work period, May 11 to 18, please understand that the dig will just be getting started. That week, we’ll do mapping, remote sensing, and survey. It takes a couple of days to get the excavation units started. It would be better to wait until at least May 22 to make your first visit.

If we cancel work on a scheduled day, I will post an announcement on this blog. I will also post a note if we plan to be on the site at a later time of the day. Please don’t visit before 10 AM, because we dedicate our early morning hours to making sure that the science is running smoothly before guests arrive.

Archaeology is unpredictable and our interpretation will change as we make discoveries. If you come to visit us on May 23, we’ll tell you what we think we’ve learned from our digging. So if you return on June 20, we will probably tell you that we’ve changed our minds and revised our earlier interpretations. As my colleague Pat says, “If we knew what was there, we wouldn’t dig it up!”

Weekend Exhibit Work

2009-04-18T17:44:00.001-05:00

I'm having a busy weekend! Gibb finished the vitrine bases in the shop. Larry and Murph are painting them. Ryan and I went up to Sandy, near Salt Lake City, to meet Gary and Jill Thompson. We completed condition reports on his collection and moved them down to the Iron Mission Museum.

I offered to help the museum staff with some public programming activities. We hosted a big group of Boy Scouts. I taught them about Paiute pump drills. It was a nice break from exhibit preparation and field school planning.

The Iron Mission Museum keeps making progress on several other projects. Below is a photo of the replica the museum is building of the blast furnace that residents operated in Cedar City in the 1850s. The wood frame will be covered with a facade of stone, which will give it the look of the old furnace at much lest cost. The interior of the furnace will be filled with interpretive exhibits. It should be done by early June.

My next post will be about the field school schedule.

Mobile blog post

Potters of the Gathering, Part 2

2009-04-15T16:07:00.005-05:00

Why choose Potters of the Gathering for our exhibit title? This is a great question and one which, as several of my colleagues pointed out to me recently, I completely neglected to explain in my post!

Leonard Arrington identified "The Gathering" as one of seven ideals that leaders of the Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter-day Saints developed to guide their community during the organization's first 15-20 years. According to Arrington, the ideals were:

1. Gathering souls from Babylon to Zion, through active mission programs.

2. Establishing nucleated villages.

3. Consecrating private property to the Church and having it returned in stewardship for the community.

4. The redemption and beautification of the earth.

5. Frugality and economic independence from Babylon.

6. Group unity and cooperation

7. Equality among members

As Arrington explained, these were ideals that infused government policy, economic development, public discourse, and individual social action. Like all ideals, people engaged with them in many different ways, but all of the ideals touched the potters and clay workers during their lives.

In terms of our exhibit, The Gathering was among the most important ideal. Many of the potters came to Utah in response to calls to serve missions settling news town and "building up home industry." Their experiences were very different within that context, but the principle of the gathering tied many of them together.

My academic interest is in the material practice of the gathering and how individuals experienced and contributed to it in their communities. The idea of The Gathering also has powerful theological meanings in Latter-day Saint communities, both historically and today. While the principle of the gathering lost its literal and material meanings by the end of the nineteenth century, the Saints kept their personal, theological, and doctrinal connections to Israel. I am not a scholar of theology, so I'll refer interested readers to Elder Russell M. Nelson's speech The Gathering of Scattered Israel from the 2006 General Conference in Salt Lake City.

My co-workers and collaborators here also chuckle that this exhibit will be the largest gathering of Utah-made pots ever assembled. I appreciate the double entendre!

Potters of the Gathering

2009-04-13T17:24:00.009-05:00

I have mentioned the exhibit we have been working on for the Iron Mission State Park Museum. Well, the final logo is done! Our exhibit, Potters of the Gathering: Clay Work in Early Utah, now has a title, logo, and color scheme. Check it out:

The design is by Darrin Fraser, the creative director at Mishap Studios. Their website is here:

http://www.mishapstudios.com

Darrin is working hard on the rest of the design. Ryan and I passed him the exhibit checklist and our layout of the exhibit. I gave him this scaled floor plan:

The plan map is hard to read at this scale, I know. But the exhibit will be about 2,200 or 2,600 square feet in total. Darrin has been visualizing the entire thing for us: color schemes, layout, and design. He came to our meeting with a 3D visualization of the 2D plan I'd drawn, which really helped me see what he was imagined (below). He's been great and I'm excited to see more of his design work.

The exhibit will tell the story of the Utah's nineteenth century immigrant potters, using archaeological artifacts, antique objects, historic photographs, drawings, DVD video, and audio recordings. We have pieces from the three largest collections of antique Utah-made pottery, along with digital video and historic images on loan from The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery and the Staffordshire Film Archive.

I am very excited as the exhibit is coming together. Gib the carpenter has most of the vitrine cases built and the rest of the staff are painting them now. The wall panels will go to the printer this week so they can be printed and mounted on boards.

The exhibit will be open from May 2nd through July 31st, so that means that it will be open the entire time we are excavating at the Davenport Pottery site. Since Parowan and Cedar City are only about 20 miles apart, visitors will be able to travel back and forth between the gallery and the excavations. This should give us the ability to layer our interpretive strategy from the site with nuances from the exhibit, and the reverse will surely be true since we have reserved one vitrine case for "The Discovery of the Week."

Things are coming together nicely and excitement continues to build!

Maps, part 2: Archaeometry

2009-04-13T12:19:00.009-05:00

People often ask me if I can tell where a pot was made by studying it closely and reading the clues of form, fabric, style, and glaze. I still have to answer them, "Not yet, not yet." We are just starting the detailed study of each pottery shop.

In addition, the problem is really pretty complicated. Right now there seem to be some elements of style that can be attributed to individuals, but we must have caution. A decorative pattern or shape of form may appear made by one potter in one location, but could be imitated or shared by another potter somewhere else. Take this example of a decorative pattern which archaeological research showed to be made by Frederick Petersen in Salt Lake City.

This pattern appears on two antique pots we will exhibit in our show at the Iron Mission Museum this summer. Can we conclude that these pots were made by Frederick Petersen? Not yet. Even if we assume that all the other potters in Utah refrained from crassly or simply copying each other's decorations and styles, consider these possibilities:

1. Frederick Petersen learned to make pots as an apprentice of his uncle, Niels Jensen. Frederick, along with Mr. Jensen and his two other apprentices, Jacob Hansen and Frederick Hansen, all immigrated to the Salt Lake Valley in 1852. The vessel forms the three young apprentices made would have been informed by common elements of style derived from their Danish heritage and their common experience under their master's tutelage. As the other apprentices grew up and established their own shops, they later worked in Brigham City and Hyrum, Utah. Could they not have shared some common decorative strategies?

2. While not as important in this specific case, we know that clay workers moved around between potteries. Different potters collaborated at different times. This means that one person could pick up a decorative technique, vessel form, or glaze type while collaborating and then carry those techniques forward to later work.

3. Of course, we also have many examples of parent-to-child transition of craft practices. Some families established 'craft dynasties' with multiple generations of potters. The Roberts family serves as the best example of this pattern, since the generations of this family spread out over the entire state, from Vernal to Panguitch.

So style remains a problematic tool right now for attributing vessels to specific makers. There will be several examples of these puzzles in the show, including the Petersen example above. Only a few potters stamped their ware. Of those those that used maker's marks like on the previous post, they only stamped a fraction of what they made.

After further study and excavation, we do expect to be able to attribute specific styles to specific individuals or at least pottery shops, but we have another tool to approach this problem: archaeometry.

Archaeometry is an area of scholarship that involves measuring the characteristics of archaeological artifacts, generally using materials science. In this case, we are using two well-established tools to examine Utah-made pottery, Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) and Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). The details of the technique aren't important to review here, but those curious can find more detail at sites like the Archaeometry Lab of University of Missouri's Research Reactor (INAA here and LA-ICP-MS here).

Both techniques involve measuring the quantity of different isotopes in an object and statically comparing the ratios of those isotopes. Each technique measures 33 or 34 different elements and then the lab staff subject the data to multivariate statistics. In the case of INAA for example, we pound small fragments ceramic kiln wasters from each site into a powder, seal them in vials, and drop them into the core of a nuclear reactor (pictured below). After irradiating them, the samples are put into a detector that counts the unique decay of each isotope in the ceramic fabric. These counts are very accurate and are measured in parts-per-million (ppm) or parts-per-billion (ppb).

When comparing all that data using computer statistical programs, the lab researchers plot each sample onto a graph in multi-dimensional space, one axis for each isotope. It is easy to imagine the three-dimensional version. I put a picture below of a bi-plot using Aluminum and Sodium. This graph appeared in an article my colleagues and I published in Historical Archaeology in 2007. As the analyst adds data about more isotopes, they add dimensions and the data forms into 'clouds' where samples with similar ratios of isotopes tend to group together.

The analysts produce these multi-dimensional clouds that result in something like a statistical 'fingerprint' for each pottery. When doing this type of study, one hopes that the clouds don't overlap very much so that some specific isotopes, usually the rare ones, can be used to argue that a sample goes with one group or another. If things work out well, when one begins to compare unknown samples (such as an unmarked antique pot) to the known samples (from archaeologically excavated kiln wasters), one can make a statistical argument like, "We are 90% confident that Pot X was made at Pottery Y."

We've been fortunate because our data shows very clear patterns, and with the caution that our sample size is small for multivariate statistics, the results are very promising. We have completed two studies where we compared archaeological fragments from consumption sites in Utah and Nevada and the results have been very provocative. As we map these patterns, we can consider a set of sites like the Muddy Mission, near modern-day Las Vegas. Most of the ceramic fragments we studied matched those we knew were made in Salt Lake City and another set we think had been made in Provo. But some of the ceramics that Muddy Mission residents used had been made by Thomas Davenport in Parowan, for example. Other pieces matched J. J. Hansen's pottery from Hyrum, Utah, 500 miles away on the other end of the Mormon Domain. (This study is forthcoming in a book called Archaeologies of the American West, edited by Margaret Purser and Mark Warner).

We are very excited by these results. We expect that as we add more samples to the database, we'll be able to start mapping the extent of distribution of each potteries products in time and space. In addition, we will start trying to sort out the different routes through which people circulated pottery in the economy: direct market exchange from stores, peddling, neighboring, family gift giving, tithing and poverty relief, and even population migration.

This is a long term goal for our studies. It will help us to really understand how individuals and families like the Davenport family managed to make their businesses succeed over their lives in Utah.

Maps- Where did potters live and work?

2009-04-08T10:24:00.008-05:00

Utah's immigrant potters left several different countries of origin. Many left from Denmark and the United Kingdom, particularly Staffordshire and the English Midlands. Other European-born potters came from Germany and Norway. Potters also migrated from other parts of the United States, including from New York, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri:

Individual potters could settle wherever they wished, but many chose to take on missions to settle specific towns and regions. The leaders of the Latter-day Saints sought to settle a chunk of the Rocky Mountain and Great Basin regions of the United States which they called Deseret. Brigham Young and his advisors led "the gathering" of people to the headquarters at Salt Lake City and then organized them into settlement companies sent throughout the region.

This pattern of settlement, guided/directed and open/undirected, led to potters distributed through the area. Each blue dot in the map below indicates a pottery. Overlapping dots represent multiple potteries in a single town. Keep in mind that some of these dots are interpretative arguments- we don't always know who partnered together and who worked independently.

Latter-day Saints established some potteries outside of Utah's modern borders:

Potteries within the modern political boundaries of Utah:

We are building a "map" of the potter's marks. The upcoming museum exhibit will present all that we know about the different potter's marks:

Object of the Week, 4/1/09

2009-04-01T12:58:00.005-05:00

This week's remarkable object is a potter's rib from the Eardley's Deseret Pottery site. A number of different potters were involved in this company, including the three Eardley brothers: James, John, and Bedson. At times, John Cartwright and Jonah Croxall also worked at this site in Salt Lake City, but during that time the pottery had a different name.

In the 1970s, a Utah State Liquor store was built on the site. For whatever reason, an archaeological survey was not conducted before construction. Lucky for modern scholars, Nancy Richards walked by one day. Ms. Richards was a curator for State Parks and she happened to be researching Utah's nineteenth century potteries. She was shocked by what she saw in the backdirt and as I have heard the story, she called up to the University of Utah for help. A group of archaeology students came down and they all spent some time frantically putting fragments of things in boxes. That collection, which has never been exhibited to the public before, will be a large part of the collection on exhibit.

A potter uses a rib as a carpenter uses a profile gauge. The rib's shape matches that of the preferred shape of a particular pottery vessel or object. While the wet shape spins upon the wheel, the potter holds the rib up against the vessel to be certain that it has the desired shape and size. The rib helps the potter to throw things "freehand" but stay close to a particular size and shape.

One of these potters wrote on this rib:

The rib is inscribed: "Flower saucer / James Eardley / Bedson Eardley" and on the side, the date "June 18, 1864". The last number is a bit messy and one could argue that it says nine and not four, but I think it is a four.

This is very cool.

I really like this object because it shows the kind of evidence that can only be taken from objects. On June 8th, 1864, the Deseret News carried this announcement: "John, James, and Bedson Eardley dissolve their partnership; James and Bedson reform the Deseret Pottery; John forms ‘Sixth Ward Pottery’ with Amos Fielding as agent" (p. 292).

Ten days before this rib was made, three three Eardley brothers broke up the Desert Pottery and one of them set out on his own. A few years after this, John accepted a mission in St. George and worked there for the rest of his life, along with kilns he operated in Beaver and Panguitch.

I don't know if the brothers divisions were friendly or strained when they split up in 1864, but the fact that James and Bedson marked this rib with their names implies that this flowerpot design was shared between them, but was not John's. It also implies that James and Bedson agreed upon this design when developing new products for the new incarnation of the Deseret Pottery. I believe that also hints that consumers in Salt Lake City cared about the design of their flower pots and that people entering the Deseret Pottery noticed the different designs by James, John, and Bedson, and further distinguished them from other partners in the pottery or other clayworks in the city.

You'll just have to come see this little gem for yourself.

Project in the News

2009-04-01T12:43:00.003-05:00

The Utah Pottery Project, the plans for this summer's excavation, and the museum exhibit all appeared in a brief story in the Deseret News. I've been chatting with some other reporters and I will post any stories here. Please drop me an email if you see a mention of the project and I'll post your note!

Rapid Progress in the Shop

2009-04-01T12:22:00.004-05:00

Gib, our carpenter using the saw in the picture below, and the Iron Mission State Park staff (including Murph, also in the picture) are making rapid progress building new wooden bases to match our Plexiglas and acrylic cubes.

To stretch our exhibit budget, we are re-using all the display vitrines (commonly called cases). The Church History Museum graciously lent us some acrylic cubes they had in storage, so combined with those we removed from current exhibits at the Iron Mission Museum, we don't need to order any new Plexiglas or acrylic boxes, and are just building new wooden bases for all the boxes. This is a huge cost savings-- acrylic boxes are expensive!-- so we will be able to put many more items out for display than we could have afforded otherwise.

The floor also looks great, thanks to the efforts of Ray and the maintenance crew here at the Iron Mission Museum!
Things are really coming together! I'm getting very excited for the opening.

Ready for Paint!

2009-03-27T13:48:00.005-05:00

This morning, I helped the staff of the Iron Mission State Park Museum prepare the rotating gallery space. We shifted things around and emptied the space out. We left most of the current photography exhibit up on the walls, but we needed to get the area ready for the floor to be repainted on Monday morning. So we left the previous exhibit and the kids' activity area so people could use them this weekend. The crew will block off the space on Monday morning with a rope and curtain while they paint the floor. The removal of the photography exhibit will follow when the floors are dry and then we'll start construction and installation of the pottery exhibit!

Ryan and I really need to settle on an official title!

If you want to see some pictures, you can check them out:
On this public link from Facebook

Press Release

2009-03-27T13:11:00.001-05:00

Michigan Technological University's media relations office has put a story out over the wires about the Utah Pottery Project. It is brief, but will perhaps point people to this blog where they can learn more about our research and discoveries!

This is the story:

http://www.admin.mtu.edu/urel/news/media_relations/845/

Besides the intellectual interests shared by researchers in the Utah Pottery Project (studying the works and lives of the nineteenth century potters), I am also trying to develop a community-based approach to archaeological scholarship. I want to link research, and the support for research, with local concerns and needs ranging from education to development. The Venn diagram below illustrates the point. Community-based archaeology has always been an important part of historical archaeology in the United States, where local research at local historical sites met local needs and interests. Recently many more archaeologists are coming around to this research style, which they call "socially-engaged" or "action archaeology."

If this is your first visit to the Utah Pottery Project Blog, you can read a bit about the research collaboration in these posts:

The first blog post is here

A Slideshow about what we hope to learn

The Davenports in England, 3/25 update

Wish List, 5/26

2009-03-26T14:39:00.005-05:00

Hi everyone,

If you have just discovered this blog and the Utah Pottery Project, you may not be aware that you could help support the archaeological fieldwork and research!

We can always use donations of cash (fully tax deductible, of course!) which we use as scholarship funds and as matching funds for institutional grants. If you'd like to donate money to support this summer's field work and the subsequent analysis, you can go to the Utah Pottery Project donation page here:

http://www.social.mtu.edu/faculty/Scarlett/Research/UPP/UPPsupport.htm

There are lots of opportunities to support the project through gifts of badly needed supplies. I include a list of some examples below.

This first list includes material urgently needed for this summer's excavation of the Thomas and Sarah Davenport pottery site in Parowan, Utah. You can have materials sent to the Iron Mission Museum in Cedar City, and they will hold them until someone from the project team can pick them up:

Utah Pottery Project/Attn: Scarlett
Iron Mission State Park
635 N. Main St.
Cedar City, UT 84720-2127

Photo supplies and archive:
We need color slide film and archival storage materials. 35 mm color slide (transparency) film serves the critical purpose of high-quality backup of digital excavation photos. Our digital photos are of high enough quality that we no longer shoot black and white print film as part of regular excavation recording.

B&H Photo wishlist for the Utah Pottery Project:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/WishList/A27DDACA5&BI=1239

www.bhphotovideo.com
420 Ninth Avenue
New York, NY 10001, USA
800-606-6969
212-444-6615

Non-archival Storage Boxes::
All the artifacts are “Bagged and Tagged” in the field. We put all the bags into boxes to transport them to the lab. In the field we use regular boxes, but once cleaned and processed, everything must be put into archival storage boxes for long-term storage.

OfficeMax Storage Boxes, 10/pk, Item # 20151540
http://www.officemax.com/omax/catalog/sku.jsp?skuId=20151540&searchString=archival%20storage%20boxes&category_Id=null

This list includes items we will need during analysis and for permanent archive of the artifacts and excavation records. These items can be shipped to:

Michigan Tech Univ/Scarlett

Archaeology Lab/Soc Sci/AOB 209

1400 Townsend Dr.

Houghton, MI 49931

Needed supplies:

Archival Storage Boxes:
Hollinger Metal Edge, Inc.
Unbuffered Record Storage Boxes with Separate Lids
250#C Corrugated Board, White, 7.5 pH

Record Storage Box - 15" x 12.5" x 10" with Separate Lid

10760$7.95, 5/$32.20, 10/$58.60, 25/$141.75, 50/$249.50
http://www.genealogicalstorageproducts.com/recstorbox15.html

Archival Storage Bags:
We “Bag and Tag” everything recovered during excavation. We use paper bags in the field while everything is dirty, but we transfer everything to archival bags once the artifacts are cleaned and prepared for lab analysis and transfer to the museum to be archived.
Archival bags can be found here:
http://www.genealogicalstorageproducts.com/arpoba.html

Useful sizes include:

2" x 3" - 4 mil Polyethylene Bags - Pack of 100 Bags
100/$4.60

3" x 5" - 4 mil Polyethylene Bags - Pack of 100 Bags
100/$11.50

4" x 6" - 4 mil Polyethylene Bags - Pack of 100 Bags
100/$12.65

5" x 8" - 4 mil Polyethylene Bags - Pack of 100 Bags
100/$16.10

6" x 9" - 4 mil Polyethylene Bags - Pack of 100 Bags
100/$19.55

9" x 12" - 4 mil Polyethylene Bags - Pack of 100 Bags
100/$28.75

12" x 15" - 4 mil Polyethylene Bags - Pack of 100 Bags
100/$33.35

13" x 18" - 4 mil Polyethylene Bags - Pack of 100 Bags
100/$37.95

6 Mil Polyethylene Bag - 12" x 18"
20/$8.80, 50/$21.00

6 Mil Polyrthylene Bag - 14" x 24"
20/$12.80, 50/$30.00

6 Mil Polyethylene Bag - 14" x 30"
20/$15.80, 50/$37.50

6 Mil Polyethylene Bag - 16" x 16"
20/$10.40, 50/$24.00

6 Mil Polyethylene Bag - 16" x 24"
20/$14.60, 50/$34.50

6 Mil Polyethylene Bag - 18" x 18"
20/$12.00, 50/$28.00

6 Mil Polyethylene Bag - 20" x 24"
20/$16.80, 50/$40.00

6 Mil Polyethylene Bag - 24" x 30"
10/$12.60, 20/$24.20, 50/$58.00

Davenports in England, 3/25 research update

2009-03-25T13:38:00.007-05:00

I received an email today from Anne-Marie Knowles, the curator at the Chesterfield Museum and Art Gallery in Northern Derbyshire, England. Ms. Knowles and I have exchanged a series of emails about Thomas and Sarah Davenport and their early lives among the potteries of Brampton. This morning, Ms. Knowles sent me a summary of what she and her colleagues at the museum have been able to learn about the Davenports.

Readers might remember that in a previous post, I mentioned that the 1841 census listed Thomas Davenport's occupation as "pottery m." I asked Anne-Marie if she and her co-workers could find out what the "m" signified: maker, manager, molder, or something else. After reading more of the original census records, they decided that "maker" was the most likely, since this census enumerator used the abbreviation for others in the neighborhood: "hat m," "smock m," and malt m." As Anne-Marie said, "There is no way you can have a smock or hat moulder!" The most important bit of information from this is that Thomas was not in charge of some division in the factory, but he was rather more likely a "regular" worker or ordinary laborer.

Ms. Knowles's team has so far been frustrated in their attempt to figure out exactly where the Davenports lived in Brampton Moor. They are getting closer to an address and expect that Thomas and Sarah's home may still be standing as an extant residence in one of Brampton's neighborhoods. They know, for example, that Thomas's father Robert and his extended family lived in Brewery Yard in 1841, probably quite close to Thomas and Sarah's home. In the 1861 census, Robert and family were living in Barrel Yard, behind the Barrel public house, in the midst of the towns pottery factories. By digging into Thomas and Sarah's neighbors' records in the census, Anne-Marie thinks they will probably be able to identify the actual house where Thomas, Sarah, and their children lived before moving to the American west.

Ms. Knowles and her colleagues also noted that in the census records of 1841, 1851, and 1861, Robert was a "laborer" in a pottery at 60, 70, and 80 years old respectively. Robert's eldest daughter was working in a pottery factory in the 1851 census, while the 1861 census records two of Robert's 15-year-old granddaughters worked in pot shops. This is not unusual for working class families in pottery towns, and it forces me to reflect on the question of Sarah's working life in Brampton, England, and then in Parowan, Utah. I am very interested to learn more about her role in the family's pot shop.

Ms. Knowles summarized her impressions about Thomas and Sarah's lives drawn from these details in the enumerator's notes:

"The picture I'm getting from the censuses is that the Davenports are a very ordinary working class family, as are all their neighbours, and typical of the area. Working on the number of people in the neighbouring households I'd make an educated guess that the house is a terraced property probably with two bedrooms, what is referred to hereabouts as a 'two up, two down and one out the back' (ie a kitchen/family room, and parlour downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs, with a 'closet' (lavatory) outside in the yard. The other adjacent homes are inhabited by labourers, cotton spinners, other pottery workers, there's a smith and someone had a shop, a grocer. The adjacent households are not all 'traditional' families (ie married parents, their children and perhaps an elderly relative), in some cases there are a number of adult lodgers, some of them women with children but no husband, sometimes the householder is an older person who presumably is letting out rooms as a source of income. Others have an older householder with a daughter and grandchildren. So I suppose it is possible that Thomas was a thrower, but he could quite easily be just a labourer - preparing the clay for use. I think, and I can't be sure about this, that if he was a kiln man he would have described himself as such to the enumerator, but I haven't been through the whole of 1841 to see if anyone so describes himself."

Anne-Marie also sent me some pictures from the Chesterfield Museum's archive. The first image below is the only photo known to show the interior of a Brampton pottery shop, that of Welshpool and Payne. From the image, you can see a fairly traditional shop layout with throwers generally stationed by the windows and their young helpers- runners and off-bearers- moving around each work station. It is reasonable expectation that Thomas built his shop in Parowan with a similar layout.

This second photo shows the Pearson Pottery in nearby Whittington Moor.

This final image is of the Alma Pottery in Brampton. Check out the footprint 0f the hovel! The hovel is the bottle shaped chimney that surrounds the kiln oven. We don't know if Thomas built a hovel or not, but I want to try and figure that out this summer.

Object of the Week, 3/24/09

2009-03-24T20:44:00.006-05:00

I have decided to start posting pictures of a single object per week in the lead up to the opening of our museum exhibit at the Iron Mission State Park Museum. The exhibit should inspire a deeper understanding of Utah's nineteenth century potters, their struggles and achievements, and the diversity of their lives and works.

I'm going to post my working snapshots of items in public or private collections, archaeological artifacts or antiques. I hope that readers will find them and come to see the actual objects in the exhibition in May, June, and July at the Iron Mission Museum.

Here is the image for the third week of March, 2009:

This is a large storage jar in the collection of Utah State Parks. Karen Krieger, the Heritage Resource Coordinator for Utah State Parks, is lending many pieces to the show at the Iron Mission Museum. This is an unsigned and unmarked pot, but I think it is among the most attractive in their collection. The crock has consistent glaze and form with others that are stamped "Deseret Pottery" in Salt Lake City. The Deseret Pottery included a number of different potters through time, but I think that Bedson Eardley was most likely responsible for this pot.

The potter dipped the lip, rim, and shoulder (and almost over the handles) into a white slip, then playfully splashed a band of green glaze around the pot's midsection. All the decoration is under a lead glaze, of course. The colors are rich and the overall effect is beautiful. This pot is very similar to one in the collection of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers in Salt Lake City, which people can go to see in the Pioneer Memorial Museum there.

Stay tuned to more objects and images, previews of our upcoming exhibit! I hope you will come see them in person during the summer and stop by our Parowan excavations during your trip.

New Digs!

2009-03-24T20:26:00.005-05:00

I am pleased to report that my colleagues at the Iron Mission State Park Museum did a bit of scrounging around in the Department of Natural Resources. They borrowed a camper trailer for me, so I have moved up in the world from camping in my Nissan Xterra to camping in a trailer larger than some of the apartments I lived in when I was in college. I have filled a propane tank, so I can cook on the range, and when the threat of freezing passes, we'll hook up the hose and my trailer will have hot showers. Living in the lap of luxury!

The fire crews will need their trailer back in May, so we won't be hauling it up the canyon for our field camp and lab, but I am very grateful for the loan during the next two months while we put the exhibit together. It is thrilling to have a table where I can plug in my laptop and keep working into the evening hours. Of course, I am equally happy that I no longer have to scrape the snow and/or frost off my tailgate before I climb out of my sleeping bag!

Field School Travel and Rendezvous

2009-03-21T16:53:00.003-05:00

Students and project Team Members have begun making travel plans, so I thought I would put up the planned schedule.

1. Travel with the Michigan Tech Caravan:

The project vehicles will depart MTU the morning of Friday, May 8th. All people riding in the MTU vehicles can ride for free, room permitting, so long as they help Jessica and Andy load the inventoried equipment into the truck and van. The drive from Houghton to Parowan takes about 28 hours of road time, or two 14 hour days. Anyone planning on riding in the vehicles should let me and Jessica know as soon as possible. There will be a reasonable volume limit on luggage. The caravan will need to arrive in Parowan by 10 am on Sunday, 5/10, so that we can unload the van and head to the Las Vegas airport to pick up more people.

2. Travel by Airplane:

Those traveling by air should make their own plans, but you will need to arrive in Las Vegas, Nevada, in time for a rendezvous at 3 pm on Sunday, May 10th. This will give us time to pick everyone up and drive back to Parowan while still leaving enough daylight for everyone to set up camp before dark.

I will let each traveler know where at the airport they should expect to meet us. You should email your flight itinerary to me when you make your reservation. Airlines are offering some pretty good deals right now.

The MTU van will only make this trip once. If you are flying but can not arrive by the appointed time, you will have to catch a public bus from Las Vegas to Parowan and we'll meet you at the bus stop.

3. Travel by Personal Car:

However you drive and on whatever schedule, you should expect to arrive in Parowan by 4 or 5 pm on Sunday, 5/10. This will give you a few hours of daylight to set up your camp and settle in before dark. We will set a specific time and place to meet in town for those who want to follow the MTU van and truck to the campground, but I will be sure everyone has detailed directions in case of schedule changes.

4. Trains, Buses, and others:

Contact me about those travel plans.

5. Final Departure:

The field school ends on June 26th and that will be our last day of work. You should expect to depart after that. The MTU van will make a shuttle run to the Las Vegas airport on the afternoon of Friday, June 26th, arriving there at about 4 pm. Depending upon when they return to the campsite, the entire caravan will depart either that evening or early in the morning of Saturday, June 27th. Caravan members should be back in Houghton in time for Track B classes to start on Monday, June 29th. If none of the caravan riders need to be back for Track B, the return trip may be extended by another day, but that will be determined during departure preparations.

I will post a note in the near future that will include the daily work schedule as well as the expected days off during the project. This will allow everyone to plan travel and vacation time during May and June.

A Sharpe Kiln

2009-03-17T09:32:00.005-05:00

As I have written in the past, I've been corresponding with archaeologists and researchers in England to get ideas about what Thomas and Sarah Davenport might have known about pottery making, kiln building, clay processing, and other related skills. I need to know as much as I can about this in order to judge the local adaptations that the Davenport's created to Southern Utah's new landscape.

Most recently, I was tracking down excavations of pottery kilns in the Derbyshire region. I found the website of the Sharpe's Pottery Museum that included a mention that the kiln had been archaeologically excavated in the 1990s. Philip Heath answered my email inquiry. Mr. Heath is the Heritage Officer for the South Derbyshire District Council. He has put me in touch with the archaeologists involved and also sent me a digital image of one of the interpretive panels at the site. He said that I could post the image on the blog, and more information about the Sharpe's Pottery Museum is on their website at:

http://www.sharpes.org.uk/

Thomas Sharpe established his pottery in 1821. The Sharpe's Pottery operated as a company, making Mocha ware and Rockingham-style ceramics. These pottery types are also known as yellow ware because the stoneware body has a strong to pale yellow colored paste. These ceramics were often decorated with annular banding and the dendritic patterns for which Mocha ware is famous.

The kiln photo above shows one possible configuration with which Thomas may have been familiar. The picture above shows the archaeological excavation inside the standing hovel-- the bottle-shaped chimney that surrounds a kiln in most English traditions. In this case, all the bricks were removed, leaving only the stained soil to mark the structure itself. While a later foundation wall cuts right across the kiln foundation, you can still clearly make out the circular footprint of the kiln and most of the fireboxes that surround it. In the English tradition, the kiln is round and the fireboxes are generally below the floor surface and evenly spaced around the outside edge.

Academic industrial archaeologists used to talk about "ethnic" or "national" technological styles, which was a way of explaining why the English immigrants to Utah built round, up-drafting kilns, while the Danish immigrants built rectangular, cross-drafting kilns. I look forward to talking with the students about this and making more posts about this in the future.

Life in Camp

2009-03-15T13:55:00.005-05:00

I thought I would post some more pictures of the future field camp, along with notes about what to expect while living there in your six weeks as a project member.

The picnic area used to be the Vermillion Castle Campground, but the USFS converted it to a non-camping picnic area and the City of Parowan manages the site. All the groups involved issued us a special use permit so we could camp at the site. We will be the only overnight residents at Five Mile, but picnic-ers and hikers will pass through there during the day.

Bowery Stream and Vermillion Castle:

Tables and fire rings in the group camping area. Probably our archaeology lab! You will need to bring your basic camping gear, and we'll have potable water brought to the camp (potable means you can drink it, unlike the fresh and clean, but untreated stream water).

Each student/volunteer is responsible for their own food during the project. We'll have some basic cooking gear. There is a supermarket in Parowan, a few minutes from the camp, and we'll make visits periodically after the work day before we head up the canyon. Students often organize into a group to cook meals and clean up each day. It is more efficient when everyone shares the work.

Because the picnic area used to be a campground, there are toilets on the site. That means no port-a-johns! There are facilities for men and women. You will need to use solar showers, but since Utah's sun heats them up nicely, we'll have plenty of hot water.

The picnic area has other basic facilities, including this shelter. Like all camping situations, we'll have to keep an eye on the weather and Bowery Creek.

We will be staying between two mountain ridges that vary from 800 to 1,000 feet above us on either side. That means that while it will be light early when we wake up, the sun won't break over the mountain ridges until later in the day. The canyon faces west however, so we'll have plenty of sun in the afternoon when we return from fieldwork. The valley and creek are full of the plants and animals that make these mountains famous as part of "Utah's Color Country"! The winter water will result in beautiful spring for us.

The drawback of being in a deep canyon surrounded by beauty is that there will be no cell phone service at camp. To use your cell phone, you'll need to either go down to town (about 5 miles on paved roads) or hike up to the top of Vermillion Castle or Noah's Ark (although I didn't test this yet because of the snow). The latter hike is only a mile, but it is up about 1,000 feet. This picture is from the trailhead in camp, looking up 1,000 feet to Noah's Ark:

I plan on climbing up the trails for sunrise and sunset (at least one time for each) during the six weeks of field school! Probably not on the same day, however, since that would be a lot of climbing for a work day....

Camping Details are Official!

2009-03-15T13:01:00.013-05:00

It is official! The 2009 field camp will be in the beautiful mountains above Parowan and it will be free to students and project participants.

We will camp at the Five Mile Picnic Area up First Left Hand Canyon in the Dixie National Forest. The camp is offered at no charge to students and project participants. Several people worked in support of the research effort to make his happen, including Todd Prince at the Iron Mission State Park; Joe Melling and the City Manager's staff the City of Parowan; and Steve Robinson, Marian Jacklin, and Gretchen Merrill from the Cedar City Ranger District of Dixie National Forest.

I thought that the enrolled students would like to see some pictures, so I hiked up to the picnic area this weekend. Here are some of the pictures of my hike up First Left Hand Canyon on the way to the site:

Next are some stitched panoramas of scenes from the campground. The camp will be at the trailhead for two hikes, one up to Vermillion Castle (left in photo) and the other to Noah's Ark formation (right in photo):

This is a view from the campground itself:

I'll post some more images from around the campground in my next post.

Evolving Field Camp Details for Summer 2009

2009-02-19T15:48:00.008-06:00

I've been getting a number of requests from students for more details about our plans for the field camp during the 2009 excavations at Parowan. So I thought I would post some of them here:

1. Getting there:

You will have to get yourself to Utah. If people are going to fly, we’ll all rendezvous in Las Vegas at the airport and the project van will bring you all back to Parowan (about 2-2.5 hours). People are welcome to drive their own cars and meet us in Parowan at the designated time. For MTU students- if you are in Houghton in May, you can probably catch a free ride in the MTU vehicle headed to the site. Space will be limited and those who sign up first will get first priority. The same will be true of the return trip.

2. Where you live:

We will be camping in the mountains above Parowan on the edge of the Dixie National Forest. We are finalizing details right now, but we expect the campground will have pit toilets and spots for tents, but we will bring in water. There will be no cost to camp at the site, but each student will need their own tent, sleeping bag, and other basic gear. We will also try to provide some cooking equipment and I'll email a final list of gear and supplies you will need. If you don't have access to camping gear, I will try to match you with someone who can loan old equipment.

Remember that we are camping in the desert for six weeks. There will be no electricity in the camp. There will be no building at the camp in which we can lock things. While we expect to have access to power and secure storage in town, you should not bring a lot of expensive stuff that you won't need- jewelry, electronics, DVDs... If you can't use it by flashlight or firelight, you probably won't need it.

3. What you eat:

While we will provide some camp cooking equipment, each student will have to buy and cook their own food. Students usually group together to get this done- including communal buying of groceries, cooking duties, and washing up. Everyone takes turns and thus also will have some days off.

4. When you work:

This will be a public archaeology dig. I have planned our schedule to maximize our availability to guests, visitors, and tourists. We will generally work 10 days on, 3-4 days off. This is a fairly common rhythm on archaeology projects in the west. Work generally goes 8-3 on the dig site and then evening activities once or twice per week, including discussions, team meetings, and lab activities. If Utah gives us a blistering hot summer, we'll switch to 'Mediterranean hours' where we wake up and get to work with sunrise and quit by noon. We will also be available for some evening hours to give tours and talk with visitors, but these times will be very infrequent.

5. When you don't work:

Since we expect to work 10 on 4 off, this means that during the six week field school, you will have three long breaks. Each break will last 3 or 4 days. This time will allow people to explore the fabulous landscapes near Parowan. There are dozens of national and state parks, monuments, recreation areas, and forests to explore. Here are some links:

-National Parks including Arches, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Canyonlands, and Great Basin National Parks and the Grand Canyon's northern and southern rims,

-National Monuments and Recreation Areas (Grand Staircase-Escalante, Lake Mead, Glen Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, Hovenweep, Rainbow Bridge, Cedar Breaks).

-National and State Forests (Dixie, Fishlake, Kaibab, Wasatch-Cache, Humboldt, Toiyabe, among others)

-State Parks- there are 22!

Oh, and also Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and Lake Mead.

There is a lot to see in Southern Utah! Readers of the blog can feel free to add their own favorite spots as comments.

History of the Brampton-area potteries

2009-02-17T19:09:00.005-06:00

Janine Mannion-Jones posted a great outline of the history of the potteries in the Brampton area, in the region where Thomas grew up. Her outline is based upon the work of Josie Walters. The site includes photos of the landscape and some example clay work.
http://www.jmjpottery.com/history/index.html

Philip Mernick is a collector and a researcher of British stoneware hunting jugs. His information about Brampton came from Ronald Brown's 1994 article on the potteries of Derbyshire in the Journal of the Northern Ceramic Circle. He has also worked with the collection at the Chesterfield Museum, with the help of curator Anne-Marie Knowles. He has published information with some pictures here:
http://www.mernick.org.uk/brownjugs/Brampton/Brampton.htm

One final link for readers! This site includes information extracted from Piggots Directory for 1835 and it lists several potteries in the area of Brampton Moor and New Brampton, including:
Briddon, Samual & Henry. (Plain & Fancy). Brampton Moor.*
Knowles, Luke. Brampton Moor.
Oldfield, Thomas & Co. (Plain & Fancy). Brampton Moor.
Wright, Edward & Son. New Brampton.
Wright, John. Brampton Moor.

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/colliery/Chesterfield/Chesterfield_Potteries.htm

The Davenports in Utah

2009-02-17T18:03:00.004-06:00

Davenport family histories say that Thomas, Sarah, and their children arrived in Salt Lake City on October 8th, 1852. They left for the Iron Mission pretty quickly after reaching Utah, since they arrived in Parowan on November 4, 1852.

The Davenports took a bit of time to get their house and shop set up, but they fired a kiln of pottery in November of 1853. Almost all of it failed. The same happened at the second firing in 1856 and the kiln was nearly a total loss. The third try was in the spring of 1857 and about 1/3 of the kiln was good. By 1858, they fired with complete success (according to family history, based on a summary written in Thomas's diary). Some time during this period, Thomas also changed the source of his raw material. A traveler told him about a better clay source, which he adopted for his work.

This is what fascinates me about the Davenports' lives-- how did they figure that out? How did he learn about the clays? How did he figure out how to build and operate a kiln? To make glaze from scratch?

Thomas and Sarah traveled to Salt Lake City in late October of 1856 and received their Church endowments the following month. They returned to Parowan in the spring of 1857. I have often wondered if he met with other potters in Salt Lake City during that trip to talk about his technical problems and visit their facilities. A number of English-born immigrant potters had current operations in Salt Lake, including Alfred Cordon, who had been in charge of the Church-supported Deseret Pottery factory between 1851 and its closing in 1853. Alfred Cordon was also one of the bishops in charge of answering inquiries from newly arrived immigrants about the remote settlements (Deseret News 18-Sept-1852, p. 1). I don't yet know where Alfred Cordon was in 1857, however, so we'll see what I can learn.

Thomas may also have interacted with the Danish immigrant potters. Niels Jensen and his three apprentices, Jacob Hansen, Frederick Hansen, and Frederick Petersen, had arrived in Salt Lake City and begun making pottery in the fall of 1852. The potters at Jensen's shop experienced more practical success than the English immigrants who had attempted to set up their factory based upon a the industrial pattern from Stoke-on-Trent. Of course, Thomas and Sarah may also have spent time with Horace Roberts and his family in Provo. Like the Jensen's, the Roberts family had been operating their pot shop since 1852.

Thomas and Sarah took this trip for sacred business related to their Church duties. During their travels, they passed back over the landscape between Parowan and Salt Lake City. I also find it useful to think of them traveling over a technoscape, where they passed nodes of information about potting. I am trying to figure out what role that played in the evolution of Thomas's technical prowess.

Besides working at their pottery, Thomas, Sarah, and their children were active in Parowan's community. They were subscribers to help build the Rock Church, 1867-1870. The family history claims that he was the director of the Parowan branch of the United Order, 1875-1876. The UO was a religious-inspired plan to create utopian communities. The Parowan UO didn't last past one year, however, but Thomas also served the community as alderman, city councilor, and treasurer.

In the 1860s, Thomas and his son William worked with others to try and open a coal vein, which would have been very useful for the pottery, but the deposit didn't work out.

I'm going to be researching descriptions of the family house and property and I'll try to post information about that as soon as I can.

From Brampton to Parowan

2009-02-10T11:36:00.003-06:00

I know that people who research family and Mormon history are keenly interested in emigration details, so I've posted the following part of the Davenports' story:

Thomas and Sarah moved with their children to the United States in November of 1849. They all presumably left from Liverpool on November 10, 1849 and arrived in New Orleans on December 24th, 1849. They traveled in the 45th company, aboard the Zetland, under the presidency of Elder Samuel H. Hawkins.

The Davenport family history recounts his trip up the Mississippi by transcribing Thomas's entries in his diary. The family went to St. Louis and then on to Council Bluffs, Iowa, arriving there on May 9th, 1850. They eventually moved to a farm in the Key Creek Branch where they spent about a year while they prepared to travel to Utah.

The Church immigration records say (according to family history) that the family left on June 20th, 1852, for Big Pigeon where they joined the 16th company led by Captain Uriah Curtis. They arrived in Salt Lake City on October 8th, 1852, and left for the Iron Mission pretty quickly thereafter, since they arrived in Parowan a few weeks later on November 4. They went south because community leaders had requested a potter from the Church's leaders.

For the purposes of our archaeological research, this part of the Davenports' story is interesting because there is no indication that Thomas and Sarah spent any time making pottery in Iowa or anywhere else in the United States. They did not have time to learn much about potting while traveling or living on the Mississippi River. Their potting skills brought them from Brampton to Parowan.

The Davenports in England

2009-02-10T11:11:00.004-06:00

Over the next few days, I thought I would post some of the information I have gathered about the Davenports. I'll start at their beginnings-- births, marriage, and starting their family in England.

Thomas Davenport
born: April 1, 1815; parish of Brampton, County of Derby, England.
fifth child of Robert Davenport and Ann Jarvis Davenport

Sarah Burrows (Davenport)
born July 24th, 1811; parish Eckington, Derby, England.
fourth child of John Burrows and Charlotte Barber Burrows.

According to family histories, Thomas and Sarah married in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, in 1836. Their children were baptized at St. Thomas in New Brampton. According to online records at Genuki, Thomas and Sarah lived in Brampton Moor and Thomas was listed as "potter" and "working potter". The 1841 census lists them living in New Brampton, not Brampton Moor, and also lists Thomas as a "Pottery M" which some modern Davenport family researchers take to mean "pottery molder" but I think may just be "pottery maker".

According to the family history, these are the key events recorded in the records of the Latter-day Saints:
Thomas was baptized April 21, 1847 and Sarah two weeks later, June 8, 1847.
Thomas was ordained a teacher shortly after baptism and then ordained a priest on September 26th of that same year. The family history gives two dates when Thomas was ordained an elder: March 20th and April 27, 1848.

The Latter-day Saints changed branch designations through time as the membership expanded and contracted. March 20th, 1848, while Thomas was made an elder, he was also appointed as president of the Bolsover branch in Derbyshire. March 6, 1848, he became branch treasurer. In June of 1848, the Holdover and Warley branches were combined into a single unit and Thomas was appointed president of the newly combined branch. Through the rest of 1848, he was mentioned regularly in the records in relation to his missionary efforts both traveling and hosting visiting members. The family history says that the official Church records make no reference to his daily work.

Thomas and Sarah's children born in England before 1849:

William Davenport, b. May 28, 1837, bap. June 6, 1837, Brampton, Derby, England.
Thomas Davenport, b. April 7 1839, bap. May 5, 1839, Brampton, Derby, England.
Died February 16, 1840; buried St. Thomas Church, Brampton, Derby, England.
John Davenport, b. December 17, 1844, bap. January 1, 1845, Brampton, Derby, England.
Sarah Ann Davenport, b. February 14, 1847, bap. March 21, 1847, Brampton, Derby, England.

I'm working with a curator at the Chesterfield Museum, trying to learn more about where Thomas worked making pottery, what his jobs may have been, and if Sarah worked in a pot shop.

In my next post, I'll list the Davenport's immigration information.

Building alliances, seeking support

2009-01-28T12:16:00.004-06:00

Hello everyone!
I have been constantly on the road past two weeks, spreading the word about the Utah Pottery Project and identifying allies and building bridges for the future. My inclusive vision for the future of this project requires a broad coalition of people beyond those traditional communities with interest in archaeology, i.e. academic scientists and humanists.

Last week I was in New York City at Americana Week. I went to both the American Antiques Show and the New York Ceramics Fair. I wanted to talk with researchers, collectors, and dealers interested in the history of American Ceramics. I had many interesting conversations with people, particularly at the Ceramics Fair, and several individuals offered to give their advice about the antique ceramic objects attributed to Utah manufacture in Utah museums. I will write more about New York soon and share some of the details of my conversations.

I left New York to head to Providence, Rhode Island. I was invited to speak about the Utah Pottery Project at Brown University. The Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World hosted group of scholars researching design and material culture, using both scientific and humanistic perspectives. The Material Matters Symposium 2009 included a series of very interesting speakers, and I will write more about our discussions when I am back in the office after my current trip. Many of the scholars and students at the symposium talked to me about how excited they were by what we are doing in Utah. One example was that some people thought that our idea of studying a series of ceramic workshops, examining questions of creativity and learning and the socially embedded nature of technological systems, all at the scale of individual potters, potting families, or small groups, excited them because our insights into archaeological problems would help them to think about pottery factories in the Roman world.

After just about 8 hours at home, I turned around and came back to Salt Lake City on a trip sponsored by the Chipstone Foundation of Milwaukee. I was here to meet a group of people gathered over pizza to talk about the impoverished nature of historical archaeology, decorative arts history, material culture studies, and other allied topics. We brainstormed about the potential for research and programs of public interpretation. After lots of interesting discussion, we broke up for the evening after agreeing to meet again soon. What was overwhelmingly clear was that we needed a social network of people interested in matters of material culture in Utah. We also agreed to think about how to solve some of the political and funding problems that have discouraged research in this area.

During the last two weeks, I've also made lots of interesting progress on planning for the dig in Parowan. Details of those developments will follow at the end of my meetings here in Utah.

Small Grant

2009-01-15T17:35:00.006-06:00

Good news arrived today! Michigan Technological University awarded me a Faculty Scholarship Grant. While the committee could only fund part of my request, the funds will be enough to ensure that we can take at least one field vehicle to Utah. More fundraising and support needs for the project are still out there, but this grant will make a big difference!

More from the Society for Historical Archaeology meeting

2009-01-15T10:06:00.004-06:00

While at the conference, I had several long conversations with my colleague Benjamin Pykles. Ben is an assistant professor at SUNY Potsdam, and he leads a fascinating archaeological study of the Latter-day Saints' settlement Iosepa in Skull Valley, Utah.

Iosepa was settled by a group of Polynesian immigrants in the 1880s. The Latter-day Saints had been very successful missionaries throughout Polynesia, particularly in Hawaii. Many came to Utah and settled into this Skull Valley community where they undertook drylands farming and mineral prospecting. Many families lived there for three decades.

Like most archaeological sites, Iosepa's remains serve as a touchstone for current social controversy. The site is a sacred and powerful place to many of those who are descended from the settlers, and the landscape itself reminds people of past struggles for equality, faith, and social justice.

Ben's study is a multi-year project, starting with survey and limited testing. Ben's collaborators are working with ground penetrating radar and he hopes to do some multi-spectral aerial photography in the future. Both types of survey will help him map the imprint of peoples' activities at Iosepa.

I admire Ben for his earnest efforts to bring disparate stakeholder groups together and include them in his research work.

For more information and some photos, click on these links:

Archaeology Magazine:

http://www.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/letter.html

The Bonniville Mariner Blogger worked with Ben and his team during last year's dig:

http://bonnevillemariner.wordpress.com/category/iosepa

Slide Show: Davenport Pottery Preview

2009-01-12T11:44:00.005-06:00

I have posted some pictures that show why the Davenport Pottery Site is so interesting and exciting. You can see the show using this public link on Facebook: (There is no need to join facebook to watch the slides).

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2004515&id=1010816510&l=2a5870b1ab

Society for Historical Archaeology Annual Meeting

2009-01-12T11:11:00.004-06:00

I've just returned from the 2009 Annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology. This year we met in Toronto, Canada, an historic and vibrant city. The research reports and presentations that I heard inspired me, particularly those that explained other major efforts at community-based archaeological research. I talked at length about the developing plans and partnerships in Utah, particularly about the Davenport dig and museum exhibit. I'm already looking forward to the 2010 meeting next year-- not only because it is in Florida in January, rather than northern latitudes!

While on the plane, I had uninterrupted time to read. As a result, I "checked-off" one of the items that had been high on my priority list. I read Nancy J. Andersen's essay about Horace Ephraim Roberts, his family, and his pottery-making activities in Illinois, Iowa, and Utah. Horace built the first operative pottery in the state, probably to the embarrassment of the Staffordshire potters that tried to get a factory operating in Salt Lake City. Horace built his pottery in Provo and began selling ware in 1852, before anyone else was really successful at the business. The other thing that makes Horace Ephraim Roberts among the most important potters in the history of Utah is that he was the head of what became the most significant "craft dynasty" in the region. Horace married Harriet McEvers and they had many children who, along with Horace's male relatives and their children, became potters. All in all, the Roberts family operated pottery shops in Provo, Logan, Mona, Vernal (near Naples), and Panguitch. Horace married two other women, Mary Jane Bigelow and Jane Eliza Graves, but neither of the two children born from those marriages (by Jane Eliza) went into the pottery business.

Perhaps we'll get to do some survey at the site of Utah's first operative pottery this spring, before we get down to business at the Davenport site in Parowan!