Brick size can be a useful tool, coupled with composition, finish,
and method of manufacture.  Too often the bricks, our commonest
ceramics, are ignored during site survey and interpretation.

We need to be more sensitive to bricks.

Several studies, going back at least 30 years, have shown that brick
size changed with architectural styles, especially the trend toward
"smooth" appearance and "buttered" joints from about  1780 to 1850.
Color, too, was subject to shifts in style.  Patches of surviving
finish brickwork, as small as a half-dozen bricks, can be very
accurately dated on stylistic bases.

Architectural historians tend to concentrate on the bonding of bricks
as a dating clue, but I've seen middle nineteenth-century pressed
brick, with thin mortar joints, laid in English bond, on a Federal
building. The whole picture of brick on a site must be considered.

Here in Delaware, as in Virginia, the little Dutch yellow Klinker was
briefly popular during the middle seventeenth century, which actually
may reflect commercial or political relationships. I've heard that
there were local bricks in that size range, but I have not seen them.

Much has been made of the "statute" brick sizes, which inevitably
varied locally. All the studies, of which I'm aware, point to
development of local brick traditions that are deviant from the
statute. There were also many personal eccentricities, such as the
oversize bricks that were used in construction of the Fredericksville
iron furnace in Virginia.

Brick analysis is a really powerful dating tool for site survey,
because it is much more precise than the accompanying artifact
scatter.  Most of the bricks on a site, especially a residential
site, will arrive at the time of construction, whereas the rest of
the artifacts accumulate over the life of the site, and frequently
are "heirloom" materials brought to the site.

As far as I can see from the survey literature, bricks are typically
underrated by survey archaeologists.

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