Video of Carol Wright

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!

Lab photo update

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

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

Work, Other than the Kiln

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.

Kiln pics

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

We were right...

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...

Project in the News- NPR Story

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

Object Photography

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!

Weekend Exhibit Work

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

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

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

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.

Object of the Week, 4/1/09

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.

Rapid Progress in the Shop

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!

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

Object of the Week, 3/24/09

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!

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

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.

Building alliances, seeking support

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.

Slide Show: Davenport Pottery Preview

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