One of our most intriguing artifacts from Plymouth to date is a ceramic smoking pipe bowl stamped with a maker’s mark. The fragmentary pipe was found in a layer that dates to the 19th century and contains other 19th-century artifacts, but the pipe itself seems to match a mark used by Richard Berryman, whose pipes were made in Bristol, England, between 1619 and 1652. We don’t know exactly how this early artifact found its way into a much later soil deposit; it may have been disturbed and redeposited during 19th-century building and landscaping along School Street.

The mark on the heel of the pipe is the initials RB with a dagger and heart between them. Pipes with the same mark were found in Ferryland, a 17th-century English colony in Newfoundland. Their example can be seen here.