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.

First Fall Term Update!

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!

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.