Lab Update- Dec. 3, 2009

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

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!

The Davenports in Utah

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.