Hello,
I know that being female while offering an opinion and a bit of a lecture on
HISTARCH makes me a target for a dressing down and being put in my place as some
perceive it, but here I go anyway.
Robin Mills asked for the Sheffield "manufacturing plant" at which his knife
would have been made. I am far from the world's expert on Sheffield cutlery,
but it is my impression that the Sheffield cutlers worked in relatively
small-scale workshops, often in their own back garden, and that different
neighborhoods or nearby villages specialized in production of different types of
objects (scissors, scythe blades, razors, knives, etc.). (I have spent time in
Sheffield and even sat in on David Crossley's historical archaeology course &
went on all the field trips as well as to the Kelham Island Museum, where
several of the "Little Meister" workshops have been reproduced in toto.) The
steelworks were big operations, of course, but the actual production of most
items we might find on our archaeological sites are probably Sheffield made (and
I would say that almost all scissors from the 19th century are likely to have
been from Sheffield--though Sheffield was busy producing fine-quality cutlery
from at least the 12th century onwards, it was the invention of crucible steel
production that really got things going in the 18th century. Crucible steel was
the secret to Sheffield's world dominance of the high-quality end of the cutlery
trade.
I don't know the answer to Robin's question, but I had begun to wonder if list
members really had any idea of how important Sheffield was as a world center of
cutlery production, given that both Joan Unwin's and Jim Symonds' requests for
information on the presence of Sheffield products on archaeological sites around
the world has elicited so little in the way of useful response. (Except, of
course, from all of you who wrote to them off-list.)
English Heritage has just published a very handsome color booklet that provides
an excellent introduction to Sheffield metalworking, and features a little bit
about the recent, very exciting, excavations conducted by the Archaeological
Research Consultancy at the University of Sheffield (ARCUS) under the direction
of James Symonds. Citation data are as follows:
Wray, Nicola, Bob Hawkins, and Colum Giles
2001 'One Great Workshop': The Buildings of the Sheffield Metal Trades.
English Heritage, London. ISBN 1 873592 66 3
English Heritage web site: http://www.english-heritage.org.uk
When I spent part of my 1994-95 sabbatical in Sheffield most of my stateside
colleagues found it very odd indeed, many asking, why don't you go somewhere
more central, like Cambridge. Clearly they hadn't looked at a map of England,
and clearly few understood why someone interested in industrial archaeology as
well as in cutlery (in my case scissors and shears) would have their sights set
on Sheffield as a place to conduct research. David Crossley and his students,
and now Symonds and ARCUS, have been doing fantastic and comprehensive work to
record and publish on the quickly disappearing evidence of the Sheffield metal
trades, and it is truly a fascinating area, far more important than most
American historical archaeologists seem to realize.
With all due respect to Solingen,
Mary B.
Mary C. Beaudry, PhD, RPA
Department of Archaeology
Boston University
675 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215 USA
tel. 617-358-1650
email: [log in to unmask]
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