We recently found an unusual Rhenish brown stoneware fragment recovered in
our excavations at the Van Sweringen site in St. Mary’s City, Maryland,
USA. It is the handle from a large bulbous vessel (jug?) made of three
clay coils wrapped together to form a spiral. The context of our
discovery is an old topsoil which contains only 17th century material. I
have found parallels in some UK collections, Steinzeug (1971) by
Bearbeitet Von Gisela Reineking-Von Bock (specimen number 324, attributed
to Frechen 1600), and both the Vergulde Draeck and Batavia shipwrecks.
There is a nice picture of one in Noël Hume’s If These Pots Could Talk
(page 121). Has anyone seen anything like it on a colonial site in North
America? I haven’t run down any archaeological examples from the US yet.
Thanks in advance for the assistance.
Silas Hurry