Having looked at the Florida Museum of Natural History web site for
identifying and dating ceramics, I must say that, for once, I agree with
Carl Steen that the dates are "horrendous." Having said that, let me
clarify by saying that I only looked at the sections of refined
earthenwares. Perhaps the section on the tin glazed and other wares are
better than the section on English wares. I disagree with Charles Ewen and
others that the system just needs some tweaking. It would take a major
expenditure of time to work out some of the problems in this body of data
for the refined wares.
Not only are there problems with dates, but the classification system
is behind the times in terms of what we know now. For example, there is a
category titled "WORMY FINGER PAINTED" that shows a number of common cable
decorated wares and cites Lynne Sussman's monograph Mocha, Banded, Cat's
Eye, and Other Factory-Made Slipware as a source. On page 17 of Lynne's
study she clearly states, "This decoration is sometimes called
finger-trailing, a descriptive but misleading term." Lynne clearly shows
how worming was created with drops from a three-chamber slip cup and it has
nothing to do with "finger painting." Further articles on this subject
have been published in Ceramics in America with excellent color photographs
of the decoration process in time lapse photography (Carpentier and Rickard
2001). In addition, Don Carpentier and Jonathan Rickard have produced a
video showing the making of these and other dipt wares.
Another unfortunate usage of terminology is the section titled
Ironstone which shows a number of sherds that are all undecorated and what
the potters called white granite in their price fixing lists, invoices,
although Ironstone is a common name used on the marks associated with these
wares. The dates given for this category in the Florida digital catalog
system are 1813 to 1900. White granite emerged out of Mason's Ironstone
and other stone chinas produced by the potters. That which was made from
ca 1805 into the mid-1840s was almost never undecorated. The dates for
white granite or white ironstone, if you prefer, are ca 1845 to ca 1930.
There is a discussion of this in my 1991 article that is cited in several
places in the Florida system (Miller 1991). It appears that whoever put
this system together just pulled the dates and did not take the time to
read the material with those dates to refine their understanding of the
subject.
It is always interesting to see reports from nineteenth-century sites
with mean dates that are earlier than the occupation of the sites and then
read the tortured explanations offered as to why the dates of the ceramics
are earlier than the site. A large part of the problem is that the dates
being used are much too broad and little has been done to refine them down
by careful consideration of the style of the pieces. Trish Samford's 1997
seriation article on printed wares is cited, but the Florida digital
archive does not make good use of it with their illustrations.
There are a number of other areas where this system falls short of
current knowledge. It would take a good deal of effort to bring this up to
speed. An article titled "Telling Time for Archaeologists" has a 22-page
paper published in Northeast Historical Archaeology that has a much wider
collection of dates on ceramics, glass and a number of other types of
artifacts that are more up to date that those used in the Florida Museum of
Natural History Digital Archives (Miller, Samford, Shlasko and Madsen
2000).
It is recommended that we send "corrections" to the web master
instead of grousing online. I do not know about others, but I feel a bit
off put by having to address something to "Dear Web Master," rather than a
real person. It is also off-putting to see contract archaeology reports
where the name of the firm is on the cover and you have to dig into the
volume to find out who wrote the thing. People should be able to clam the
recognition and/or blame for their work. I agree with Linda Derry that
having this discussion online is worthwhile and can make scholars aware
that others are interested in what they are doing and paying attention.
Such discussions present information that ranges from useful knowledge to
gibberish, however, it is a healthy process.
A digital type collection, such as that offered by the Florida Museum
of Natural History, is like a three-legged stool. One leg is the quality
of the web site design in terms of ease of use, another leg is the quality
of the photography of the objects in the system, and the third leg is the
quality of the information being presented. The Florida Museum Digital
Type Collection has done an excellent job on the first two legs, but the
third one is too short for the stool to stand up. Take a look at the
bibliography of 56 sources used to document this collection. More than 80
percent of the sources were published before 1990. There has been an
explosion of information and publication on ceramics. Whoever put the date
information together on the refined wares has not kept up on the research.
Too many archaeologists are held captive by the collections in front of
them and prisoners of their own library! I have a bibliography on ceramics
that I and send out on line if anyone cares to contact me offline.
There is an excellent web site titled Diagnostic Artifacts in
Maryland that is a work in progress by Katherine Dinnel, Ed Chaney and
others at Jefferson Patterson Park. (
http://jefpat.org/diagonistic/Historic_Ceramics.htm). If you want to see
the difference, compare what this web site has to offer on creamware as
opposed to what is offered on the Florida site. As I said earlier, the
structure of the web site and the photography is excellent. I hope that
the Florida Museum of Natural History will spend the funds to bring the
historical information up to date.
References cited
Carpentier, Don and Jonathan Rickard
2001 Slip Decoration in the Age of Industrialization. Ceramics in
America 2001. Pp 115-134. Edited by Robert Hunter. Chipstone
Foundation, printed by the University Press of New England,
Hanover, New Hampshire.
Hunter, Robert editor
2001 Ceramics in America 2001. Chipstone Foundation, distributed by
the University Press of New England, Hanover, New Hampshire.
Miller, George L.
1991 A Revised Set of CC Index Values for Classification and
Economic Scaling of English Ceramics from 1878 to 1880.
Historical Archaeology 25 (1):1-25.
Miller, George L. Patricia Samford, Ellen Shlasko, and Andrew Madsen.
2000 Telling Time for Archaeologists. Northeast Historical
Archaeology. ( 29:1-22)
Samford, Patricia
1997 Response to a Market: Dating English Underglaze Transfer
Printed Wares. Historical Archaeology 31(2):1-19.
Sussman, Lynne
1997 Mocha, Banded, Cat's Eye, and Other Factory-Made Slipware.
Studies in Northeast Historical Archaeology, No. 1. Council
for Northeast Historical Archaeology.
George L. Miller
URS Corporation
561 Cedar Lane
Florence, New Jersey 08518
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