Context makes all the difference.
regards,
suzanne


On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 8:47 PM, David W Babson <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> In Syracuse, New York, I live in an apartment complex built in the mid
> 1960s, next to a public-memorial/park style cemetery that has been in use
> since the 1840s.  The dominant artifacts in drip lines and other erosion
> features around the apartments are sherds of window glass and terra-cotta
> flower pots, along with a smaller amount of glazed, white earthenwares and
> more vitreous wares.  A local acquaintance, who grew up in Syracuse and
> remembered the city from the late 1930s, told me that the apartment site
> held a large, commercial greenhouse before construction of the apartments.
>  The greenhouse's market was people buying flowers to memorialize loved
> ones buried in the cemetery.  I'll hazard a guess, and say that the white
> earthenware/vitreous wares sherds are from "florist" vases, intended for
> use as containers for the memorial flowers.  (The more "refined" sherds I
> have seen are small, and usually degraded; I haven't examined them closely
> enough to begin to determine vessel
>   forms.)  Extrapolating, I connect this to funeral customs, and the
> 19th-century park-cemetery movement, and do not see these artifacts as,
> directly, gendered.  This may be a case of incomplete context, as I do not
> have information as to the gender, age, or ethnicity of the owner of or
> workers in the greenhouse.  But, I would say that this context (during the
> first half of the 20th century) was primarily commercial.
>
> D. Babson.
>
> ________________________________________
> From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Suzanne
> Spencer-Wood [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Friday, December 28, 2012 7:57 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Flower pots
>
> Hello Jay,
> I have inferred the meaning of flowerpots in the dominant gender
> ideology from the most popular domestic manual of the second half of the
> 19th century - The American Woman's Home by Catharine Beecher and her
> famous sister Harriet Beecher Stowe. They designed and advocated a home
> conservatory in a parlor bay window, with plants of various sizes in
> flowerpots,as well as a terrarium, to bring a family's children into
> contact with the morally reforming influence of God's natural world, which
> was associated with women. Beecher and Stowe were among the reform women I
> call domestic reformers because they valorized women's supposed innate
> superior morality due to the closeness of women and their domestic sphere
> to nature, removed from men's public capitalist sphere that permitted the
> biblical sins of usury, price gouging, and labor exploitation, which were
> all illegal in the theocracy of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Some domestic
> reformers created children's gardens and playgrounds, as well as prison
> gardens (currently reviving), to morally reform juveniles and prisoners by
> bringing them into contact with God's natural world, which was associated
> with women in the dominant gender ideology.
>
> The inference about the meaning of flowerpots is made in the following
> publication:
>
> Spencer-Wood, Suzanne M. 1999    The World Their Household: Changing
> Meanings of the Domestic Sphere in the Nineteenth Century.  In *The
> Archaeology of Household Activities,* edited by Penelope M. Allison. Pp.
> 162-89. Routledge, London.    flowerpot meaning on p. 183
>
> The moral meaning of nature motivating reform women to create green spaces
> such as children's gardens and playgrounds in men's "sinful cities of
> stone" is in:
>
> Spencer-Wood, Suzanne M. 2003. Gendering the Creation of Green Urban
> landscapes in America at the Turn of the Century.  In *Shared Spaces and
> Divided Places. Material Dimensions of Gender Relations and the American
> Historical Landscape*, edited by D.L. Rotman and E. Savulis. Pp. 24-61.
> Knoxville, U. of Tennessee Press.
>
> I would be very interested to know if you find more about the meaning of
> gardens at asylums. I was the outside reviewer on Susan Piddock's PhD
> dissertation.
>
> regards,
>
> suzanne
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Stottman, Michael J <[log in to unmask]
> >wrote:
>
> > I am looking for any information on studies of flower pots.  In
> > particular, I am trying locate good resources on the history of terra
> cotta
> > flower pots and relationship of size to use.  Also I am looking for info
> on
> > greenhouse heating systems.  The session at the SHA conference in
> Baltimore
> > last year was very good and I have some great resources from the histarch
> > discussion of greenhouses and orangeries a couple of years ago, but I am
> > looking more specifically at the mid to late nineteenth century and
> within
> > an institutional context.  I am working on a greenhouse at the Eastern
> > State Lunatic Asylum in Lexington, Kentucky where I have brick
> foundations,
> > trench features associated with a heating system (seems to be for hearth
> > and ash clean-out), and thousands of terra cotta flower pot sherds of
> > various sizes.  I am looking to relate these resources to nineteenth
> > century philosophies of architectural and landscape designs for asylums,
> > such as the Kirkbride model and to treatment philosophies (I have Susan
> > Piddock's edited volume and diss.).  Any suggestions for historical
> > references or archaeological studies of flower pots and greenhouses would
> > be much appreciated, I am trying make sure I am not missing anything.
> >
> >
> >
> > Thanks in advance,
> >
> >
> >
> > Jay
> >
> >
> >
> > M. Jay Stottman
> > Staff Archaeologist
> > Kentucky Archaeological Survey
> >
>