The Fiske Center Blog

Last winter, I put together a minimum vessel count for the blue handpainted pearlware from the Sarah Boston Farmstead assemblage. We decided to take on this task as a test to determine if in fact it would be possible to mend the ceramic collection into distinguishable vessels. We chose the blue handpainted pearlware in part because it seemed like a manageable segment of the greater ceramic assemblage, and also because we assumed ceramics with linear patterns and paint strokes would be easier to refit than say, plain white, or transfer print pieces. What we found was a little disappointing at first. We were unable to reconstruct a single vessel in the blue handpainted pearlware category. However, we were able to reconstruct enough of several rim fragments to start to

put together a catalog of all the blue handpainted rim patterns in the collection. While maybe not as exciting as entire vessels, we thought you might enjoy seeing these patterns.
As it turns out, the majority of blue handpainted pearlware rims fell into a category of ceramic glaze called, “china glaze”, a popular style of English-made refined white earthenware made between 1775-1812 (www.chipstone.org). These vessels were covered in a blue tinted glaze and painted with imitation Chinese patterns popularized by the more expensive Chinese porcelain they were meant to reference (www.jefpat.org).

This brings up an interesting question, and one that I think is very relevant for our work on the Sarah Boston Site in general: can an English ceramic, with Chinese decoration, have meaning for a Nipmuc family? The answer, as you might have guessed, is: of course it can! What we are seeing here is the entanglement of global influences (English clay and ceramic technology, Chinese styling, Native aesthetic preferences) in one local knot. This is the kind of thing we encounter all the time when we study the material dimensions of colonialism. The fact that Sarah and her mother participated in the consumption of English ceramics and Chinese patterns shouldn’t surprise us, after all, Sarah Boston and her mother Sarah Burnee didn’t experience colonialism in a vaccuum, rather, they were a part of the early American experience, buying dishes and fabric and other goods that expressed their style and preferences, just like everyone else. That didn’t make them any less engaged or involved with their Nipmuc heritage, rather it’s interesting to think about how their Nipmuc identities may have informed some of their consumer choices.

by: Heather Law Pezzarossi

In the summers of 2010 and 2011, The Fiske Center underwent a search for the home-site of Deborah Newman, a contemporary of Sarah Boston’s and a fellow Nipmuc community member who was reported by local historians to have lived on the present outskirts of the Hassanamesit Woods Property. We wanted to study her home-site in relation to Sarah Boston’s, to start getting a better idea of the Nipmuc community on Keith Hill in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. You can check out a little of her history and read more about our field approach here. The initial search in 2010 involved an intensive archaeological survey of the field we thought most likely to contain Deb’s house. The survey, in which we excavated many small 50cm x 50cm pits over a wide area at a regular interval, yielded artifacts of precisely the right time period for Deb’s occupation, but despite that fact, we remained unconvinced that we had found the site because our artifact counts were very low in comparison to the survey test results for the Sarah Boston Site, conducted in 2004. In other words, we were looking for a site that looked like Sarah’s, complete with architectural remnants, middens, and stratified deposits that represented decades of constant occupation.

In 2011 we redoubled our efforts, conducting a less intensive, but much broader survey of the surrounding landscape designed by Dr. Mrozowski, Dr. Steinberg and the Fiske Center team. Our strategy being that in order to determine the significance of the results from the first field test, we must see how its artifact densities compare to the fields that surround it. Sure enough, the surrounding fields yielded relatively fewer artifacts than that of the first survey area. Statistically, we had found something, but we were initially a bit dissapointed. Where was the house? Where were the deposits? Well, maybe Deb Newman was meant to teach us a different lesson than we set out to learn.

Her home-site has made us think more critically about what a “home-site” is, and what “home” meant for Deb Newman and other Nipmuc people in the 18th and 19th centuries. All Nipmuc people did not enjoy the permanence and visibility that came with owning land the way that Sarah Boston and her family did. On the contrary, many Nipmuc families were never granted any land to begin with, and of those that were assigned land rights in Grafton, many had to sell their plots to survive. Those Nipmuc community members with no landholdings are very nearly invisible in the colonial archive, and as it turns out, they are also very difficult to find archaeologically. The Deb Newman Site can help us put those people back into the narrative of the local past, by broadening our understanding of what “residence” can mean. *

It seems Native people of the 18th and 19th century used many strategies of “residence” that extended well beyond farmstead lifestyles. Some took jobs in the community, as farm hands, as stonemasons, as teamsters, others joined the service, or sold baskets, brooms and other wares around the region. Some families built shelters on Euro-American farms, others traveled often, lodging with other Native community members or staying at Euro-American houses; still others built shelters in swamps or caves or other conspicuous places where they could either count on temporary shelter when travelling, or reside their more permanently.

Deb Newman’s family did not in fact own the parcel of land they were reported to have been living on. Deb’s family once had land-rights nearby, but that particular parcel belonged to someone else, so it seems reasonable to expect that we are looking for a different kind of occupation than the style we encountered at the Sarah Boston Farmstead. In fact, Deb and her family were only reported to have lived there for 10-20 years. Before that, they lived elsewhere in town, after that, we don’t know. Dr. Steinberg first recognized–and we all agreed–that Deb’s dwelling on Keith Hill may have been quite ephemeral at the time, and therefore have a very different and nearly undetectible archaeological signature.

Perhaps our modest findings in 2010 revealed more in what was NOT there, than in what little material we actually found. Maybe the lesson we learned is that the Nipmuc occupation of Keith Hill doesn’t have to be uniform, in fact it can take many forms, and be much more subtle than our findings at the Sarah Boston Site. So, did we find Deb Newman? Yeah, in fact I think we did.

* Silliman (2001:195) discusses “residence” as, “the attempts of individuals to stake out a claim in their social worlds, even under contexts of oppression and domination”. I think that “residence” can also apply to physical/material worlds and in fact the two are intertwined.

Resources

Silliman, SW
2001 Agency, Practical Politics and the Archaeology of Culture Contact. Journal of Social Archaeology 1(2):190-209.

by Heather Law Pezzarossi

One of the great things about recovering and conserving iron artifacts is the incredible diversity of activities they can represent. From door hardware to cooking utensils to musical instruments, the iron objects from an archaeological site can speak volumes about the people that once used them. When we find iron objects on site, they are often so encrusted with rust and dirt that they unrecognizable as anything at all. It is the conservation process, especially the removal of rust, that allows us to finally see what an object is. Today I thought I would show a few of the interesting iron objects we’ve recovered and conserved from the Sarah Boston Site.

In August, Dr. Landon and I identified two mismatched iron shoe fittings, called ice creepers, in the Sarah Boston collection. Ice creepers attached to the bottom of the shoe, just in front of the heel, and provided the traction needed for the wearer to walk stably on ice. One dates roughly to the Revolutionary War period, when soldiers (like Sarah Boston’s uncle Joseph Aaron) were issued ice creepers so they could walk long distances on New England’s frozen waterways. The other one is similarly constructed, but obviously not a match to the Revolutionary War pair. Perhaps Sarah Boston had her own pair made for her winter travels throughout the region!

I also identified not one, but two very specialized drill bits, one large and one small. These “Spoon” or “Chairmaker’s” bits were, “especially suited for boring the holes for cane-seat chairs” (Salaman 1997:79). Native basketmakers in New England in the early 19th century were known to have also sought work re-caning chairs, or making brooms and brushes because their skills as basketmakers made them uniquely suited to these other tasks, as well. As such, these bits represent some of the most definitive material evidence we have to connect Sarah Boston to the industry of Native basketry in the late 18th and early 19th century.

by Heather Law Pezzarossi

As undergraduates our post field school lab course is a short but sweet intensive 2-week course that covers everything from washing, cataloging, labeling, and mending artifacts to aspects of metals conservation, paleoethonobotany, and an introduction to GIS. Additionally our class got the privilege to meet with the students and educators of the Native Tribal Scholars Program, a program for young, college-bound Native students in Massachusetts. Many of these young people share a common heritage with Sarah Boston and her ancestors, and were eager to learn more about our archaeological work at Hassanamesit Woods.

We had been planning for the entire week for the NTS students to visit the Fiske Center, and we were all so excited to meet and talk with them. We welcomed them around 2pm into the lab classroom for a short presentation from our director and professor, Stephen Mrozowski alongside with our lab instructor, Heather Law Pezzarossi, both of whom have been working on the Hassanamesit Woods Project for almost 7 years in collaboration with the Nipmuc Nation and the Town of Grafton, MA.

Professor Mrozowski and Heather gave a brief history of the area and spoke of how Sarah Boston, a well known Nipmuc woman of the early 19th century, who specialized in basket weaving, most likely had an extensive complex trading network for her baskets that extended beyond Worcester County. They explained that the Sarah Boston cellar-hole was buried in rubble in a bulldozing episode after the hurricane of 1938, the most powerful hurricane in the New England area in recent memory (Platt 2006, Scotti 2003).

After the presentation we took the group around the Fiske Center through the different labs to show them how artifacts are treated and preserved after excavation. First stop was to metal conservator, Dennis Piechota’s lab where he showed the students pieces of metal he had conserved from the Hassanameiset Woods Project, including an iron kettle.

Next, was Heather Trigg’s pollen lab where the students and teachers of the group learned how archaeologists study both the extraction and floatation of soil samples to help reconstruct the past environments in Hassanamesit Woods. After Heather showed us some pollen and seed samples we took our group over to the metals conservation lab where Heather Law explained how we treat rusted iron to keep it from rusting anymore, and therefore preserving its structural integrity.

We concluded our tour back at the Fiske Center lab and classroom. There, the students could see and interact with a small exhibit, prepared by the lab school students, of artifacts recovered from the Sarah Boston Site. The exhibit included many items that might be found in a typical early 19th century household, including, tools, utensils, fragments of cookware and ceramic serving vessels, buttons, buckles, and more. The students spent some time examining the objects, asking questions, and then they helped the field school students wash some of the artifacts we found this past summer.

Personally, I love washing artifacts and I think the teenagers had a blast getting a little dirty and talking about what they were washing. I was so impressed with their willingness to learn and how quickly they were able to soak it up and identify different types of artifacts! As a group, we all thoroughly enjoyed meeting and working with everyone during the Nipmuc visit. For me, being able to teach others about so much of what I had learned over the past 7 weeks, and for them to be able to share their own stories with me was truly a great experience.

By: Lauren Roach
Lauren is in her final semester at UMASS Boston as an undergraduate pursuing a double major in Anthropology and History. She loves both field and lab work, but says, “there’s nothing quite like experiencing both back to back and seeing a project through as much as possible”.