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Jun 29, 2020 | 0 comments
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Sherds Behind the Wall (6.5-minute read)
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Justin Thomas, whose daily blog on earthenware is a must-read, www.earlyamericanceramics.com, gave us an unusual story in his Antiques Journal, our
June 15 issue. It was headed “Eighteenth-Century Ceramic Remains Recovered from a Chimney of a Colonial House in Exeter, FREE twice-monthly
New Hampshire.” magazine
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The Exeter House whose paneling around the replace hid

pottery sherds for two centuries. Courtesy Justin Thomas

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Justin told of visiting the house, which was undergoing restoration, “in order to see some pottery sherds … recovered from
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behind a replace surround on the rst oor. [The paneling] was old but most likely not original to the house. All of the paneling
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“The majority of the pottery dates from the eighteenth century,” he wrote, “and includes English creamware, tin-glazed
Ipswich, MA, 01938,
earthenware, the remains of an eighteenth-century English earthenware teapot decorated in a Chinese pattern, as well as locally
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“However, it was the locally made wares that really stood out to me seeing that red earthenware production dates back to the
1700s in Exeter and the location where this pottery was produced was only about a mile or two away from this house. The
recovered sherds include the remains of a jug along with a black glazed inkwell. I suspect the inkwell dates from the late
eighteenth century or perhaps earlier, while the jug could have been made in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century.

“Interestingly, the practice of concealing objects within replaces, walls, under oorboards and other areas within a house is
considered an Old World folk practice usually done to prevent some form of witching.”

Restoration

Some of the 18th-century sherds discovered behind the

paneling.
  

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 A late 18th-century earthenware inkwell probably made

locally.

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Witch or Privy?

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Justin’s story got me thinking. I’ve seen at least two other houses where restoration work has uncovered pottery and glass sherds
behind paneled walls.
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The curator of one shared Justin’s belief that this might have been a folk-lore attempt to ward off witches or evil spirits. It is the
sort of belief that catches the imagination, but I don’t know of any contemporary accounts of the practice (like the accounts of
burying “witch bottles” in the hearth for the same end.)

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Excavating a privy in Philadelphia. Courtesy Rebecca Yamin, the Museum of the American Revolution.

Who can tell? When in doubt, go for the simplest, most mundane answer.

In this case it might have been a way to dispose of the garbage.

In this period there was no such thing as garbage collection. Every household had to dispose of all the waste that its members
produced.

There was virtually no food waste – every part of the animal, fruit or vegetable that could be eaten was eaten. And what was Shop Directory
inedible was used for something else – skins went to the tanner, horns were made into drinking vessels, the heads and bones of
sh fertilized the soil, eggshells were fed to the hens…And so on.

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Tin-glazed earthenware plates, English or Dutch, mid-18th century, reconstructed from sherds in a Philadelphia privy. Courtesy Rebecca Yamin, the Museum of

the American Revolution.

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Waste that could not be re-used was typically tossed into the privy, aka the “necessary” – which is why archeologists love digging
through stuff that they would not love digging through if it hadn’t turned into a powdery loam over the years.
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Rebecca Yamin makes the point that “people threw unwanted possessions in their privies because they had no other place to put
them. Urban lots were small and there was no city garbage collection.” But there was another place, at least for some of them. Digital
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Privies were nite. In the area of Philadelphia where Yamin worked, they were four or ve feet in diameter and in 1763 a city 8 hours ago
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ordinance set a maximum depth of six feet. They were lined with dry-laid brick so that liquids could seep into the ground, but Stay Home (1665
solid wastes accumulated in the shafts. version): “It’s a
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John Fiske
Some 50 years ago
I lived near the
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(pronounced

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Chinese export porcelain teawares excavated from the privy. Courtesy Rebecca Yamin, the Museum of the

American Revolution.

So if a household had a pile of broken pottery or glass out back, it made more sense to shove it behind the paneling when a house
was being built than to throw it down the privy. This is pure speculation, of course, but informed speculation may be better than
nothing when there are no records.

At the very least, the citizens of Philadelphia and Exeter did not have plastic to deal with – I hate to think how rapidly that would
ll up a privy: Equally, I like to think of households being responsible for disposing of their own waste. There were no toxic
land lls in Colonial America.

Reference: Rebecca Yamin, Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution, Temple University Press, 2019.

Liverpool punchbowl, c. 1760, “Success to the Tryphena,” reconstructed from sherds from a privy. Courtesy Rebecca Yamin, the Museum of the American

Revolution.