"In studying early pottery one sooner or later turns to archaeology to establish a reasonable and accurate connection between surviving objects, whose provenance is not known and documentary research into potters and potteries.
The methods of excavating early potteries are determined largely by logic and experience. Archaeological digging of this kind requires the background, money, time, physical facilities, and access to specialized analytical talent to glean all the information inherent in a site, and to assess full and publish the results. Careful and often slow digging, keeping good records, and cleaning and reconstructing the artifacts recovered are essential. Moreover, the results of even a well-done dig left unpublished are useless to everyone, but the digger.
Assuming the ideal, that a site has been undisturbed, former buildings may still be visible as mounds outlining foundations, for an abandoned pottery can easily become overgrown and covered with topsoil within half a century. Most undisturbed pottery sites have quantities of potsherds and sometimes brick lying on the surface, pushed up by frost and the growth of roots. The nature of these remains can provide a rough indication of what is likely to be found by excavating.
The underground remains of most North American pottery sites consist of production buildings, kilns, and waster dumps. Generally speaking, the buildings are archaeologically the least important of the three. Any structure could serve as a pottery shop, and shops and storage buildings were usually abandoned and empty before their demolition or eventual collapse.
The remains of kilns -- usually only their brick or stone floors or bases -- are most important. They indicate the kiln's shape and what type of draft it had, while the surrounding rubble usually provides clues as to its upper structure. Remains or outlines of fireplace bases (generally two or four in North American earthenware kilns) are often evident, and sometimes traces of the vertical structure of the fireplaces are found, as well. Alongside the remains of the kilns there are often setting tiles, stilts, wedges, and saggars, which serve as evidence of firing techniques. Occasionally, there are even sherds and pottery dating from the time of the final firing of the kiln.
Waster dumps, usually located near the kilns, contain pottery rejected for one reason or another during production. Over the years the piles often grew to between three and five feet deep and spread over an entire pottery yard, for the typical earthenware pottery was hardly a tidy operation. Because waster dumps always contain many essentially identical pots, all fragmentary, digging must be very methodical. The process is somewhat akin to working on ten thousand different jigsaw puzzles, each with pieces missing, but with a hundred thousand extra pieces thrown in which fit none of the puzzles. Objects found in and around a kiln can be associated with its last firings. This is not the case with waster dumps, which although far more productive of masses of material and reconstructible examples, are more difficult to dig and to interpret.
No two excavators agree on the best methodology for digging waster dumps, and indeed conditions probably vary too much for there to be a single, ideal method. Some prefer to dig every sherd from the full depth of a five-foot square and depend on acres of table space and hundreds of hours to make something of it all. Others, without this sort of space or time, virtually reconstruct pottery in the ground with a trowel in one hand, a roll of masking tape on the other wrist, and a pile of paper bags alongside in which to put pots that have been taped together.
The primary drawback of waster dumps is that they represent only the pottery's rejects, not its full production. What is found in them is most useful for technical analyses of the potter and identification of types of objects made. They do not, however, offer valid clues to dates, total production, percentages of different types of objects made, or pottery successfully fired and sold.
Pottery thrown on a waster dump usually shows visible signs of why it was rejected. Much was discarded after the first, or biscuit, firing and is discolored or misshapen owing to reduction or overfiring. Occasionally biscuit-fired earthenware was covered with lead oxide glaze before being discarded, but as this pottery was never refired, the glaze appears as a coating of orange-red powder. Stilts, saggers, pins, and other kiln furniture turn up in quantity in waster dumps. One also finds sherds fused together or finished and distorted pots, indicating that all or part of a kiln load of stacked pottery collapsed during firing. Inappropriate glaze mixtures or glazes fired at too hot a temperature appear bubbled or discolored, while structurally weak pottery consistently shows fractures in the same place.
Information gleaned from kilns and waster dumps, when correlated with analyses of the glazes and bodies of pottery recovered, provides a very good over-all interpretation of the technical level of pottery operations. Moreover, there is no reason to doubt that recoveries from early pottery sites represent most of the forms produced at the potteries. The pottery excavated thus provides a reliable and precise key to attributing existing intact pieces."
Note: I think the following group of photographs help support Donald Blake Webster, when he wrote, "No two excavators agree on the best methodology for digging waster dumps, and indeed conditions probably vary too much for there to be a single, ideal method."
Potter's Kiln and Waster Dump in North Yarmouth, ME
19th Century Potter's Kiln and Waster Pile in North Yarmouth, Maine
Circa 1910
Local Industry Circa Late-18th Century to Late-19th Century
Photo Courtesy: Yarmouth, Maine Historical Society
Waster Dump in Conostogo, ON
William Eby Pottery Waster Pile - Conostogo, Ontario
Circa 1855-1907
Site was Excavated in 1967-1968
Photo Courtesy: Royal Ontario Museum - Toronto, ON
Kiln Waste in Merrimacport, MA
William Pecker May Have Disposed Kiln Waste into the Merrimac River in Merrimacport, MA
Circa 1784-1820
Many Artifacts Have Been Recovered on the Shore
Pecker May Have Disposed Some Kiln Waste into the River
But the Details are Not Entirely Known
Please Stay Tuned...Much More to Come...
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