By all means, I agree with Adrian's statement that everyone on the list
should download the Bill Adams essay on time lag. It's a subject that has
been vexing all of us for a long time.

However, in my humble opinion, Bill missed what I consider to be the most
important factor in ceramic assemblage dating, and that is the life cycle of
the site occupants.

There are times of life when we buy new things, and times of life when we
don't. What we break and discard (the archaeological record) does not
necessarily reflect what we actually owned. This is part of the reason that
probate inventories are seldom congruent with the archaeological record.

Printing type, which is extremely sensitive to style, and readily datable,
should provide a good source for assessing consumption habits over the
printer's lifetime. With apologies for a long posting, I would like to offer
a preview of my current research on human life cycle as expressed in
artifacts. I had the privilege of examining a "site" that was still occupied
and intact, while one of its creators was still present to explain it.

Lena Simmons was 21 when she married Ben, a widower who was about thirty at
the
time. Lena knew nothing about printing, but Ben was a master She learned
from him, somewhat later in life than most printers. He sent her to Linotype
school, but never bought one. Eventually, Ben died and Lena continued the
shop. She moved the shop after his death to a cinder-block garage and kept
printing. Finally, after 75 years in business, she retired and sold off the
shop to two younger printers. She died nine years later at 104.

Before she broke up the shop, Mrs. Simmons allowed me to examine it
archaeologically, as both a printer and an archaeological historian. Most of
the type and equipment was bought before Lena arrived in the shop. It
reflected Ben's aesthetic training in whatever shop or school he trained in.
Type styles are a great archaeological indicator because of their
well-documented changes through time. A printer carries his training and
taste for decades.

Lena added exactly one type face after Ben died. She frequently supplemented
old faces with the same ones, since ATF was famous for keeping faces in
stock for long times. This distressed me until I learned that the font
schemes tended to change over time. When Cheltenham was introduced, it
featured a whole lot of special characters that were eventually dropped.
Therefore I can date Ben's very early ATF Cheltenhams as earlier than my own
ATF fonts that were cast about 1960 and thereafter.

Stan Nelson, who curates such things at the Smithsonian, visited the shop
while it was intact. In the drawer under the composing stone was a hammer.
Nelson was dumbfounded. This was a special hammer used for re-covering
ink-balls, which were wool-filled parchment spheres used for inking forms
before rollers were introduced in about 1820. Yes, I said 180 years ago. Yet
there it was in Lena's drawer. She didn't know where it came from. It was
always there.

A few months later I was in the shop at Colonial Williamsburg, where a
smaller version was hanging on the wall. I asked where they got it. The
printer answered that none had survived, and they had had one made from a
drawing."It's too small," I replied. "How do you know?" they said. When I
told them I had actually handled an original, you could have cut the
disbelief with a knife.  The last known advertisement for such a tool was in
the 1870's, but here was one in daily use.

I'm developing a life cycle article based on my experience with Mrs.
Simmons.

When one interprets a site, it is important to consider the age of the
occupant. In my inventory today there is a heavy skew in favor of goods
bought when I was between the ages of 30 and 40. My house is equipped with
durable (and therefore archeololgically sgnificant) appliances made around
1972-1975, when the house was remodelled. I didn't use screws to secure the
wallboard, but they were available at the time. Today I have an electric
screwdriver, but I'm not building anything. All my construction was with
wire
nails, except where I have used cut or wrought nails for effect.

At age 61, I am eating off plastic dishes, and plastic soft-drink cups, all
from the nineties. Yet I am surrounded by old ceramics, including a
pearlware set we have used twice
and some eighteenth-century jugs that are kept around just so I can watch
visiting archaeologists pee their pants. Most of these ceramics will never
appear in my archaeological record, but will appear in my probate inventory.

CONCLUSION:

A major factor in ceramic dating is the life cycle of the site's occupants.
We acquire at certain times in our lives. We inherit at certain times, and
we discard at predictable times. For every thing there is a season.

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