Sunday, October 14, 2012

some photos from our last chapter meeting

Robert Browne shows Dr. Holly Martelle one of the washed pieces of pottery

It was an all pottery kind of a meeting on October 11th 2012.  Two components:

  1. washing artifacts from our Public Archaeology Day (with pizza for wages for the washers)
  2. a presentation on Huron Ceramics from the Ball Site by Dr. Holly Martelle
Dr. Martelle stressed a number of key points:
  • The Ball Site has been excavated over 25 years and offers an unusally large sample for study
  • earlier study of pottery relied on small samples
  • earlier study of pottery tended to look at pottery fragments, rarely at whole pots or reconstructed whole pots
  • more recent study and analysis suggests a range of sophisticated pot types, a few skilled potters not every Huron woman making her own pots, 
  • discussion of Huron pottery with contemporary expert potters suggests that Huron pottery was of the highest quality, perhaps the highest quality in North America.
  • some pots have walls as thin as 3mm
  • difficult to recover pottery specific tools, even today most potters use readily available tools used for other functions or the tools are of organic materials that are unlikely to have survived 400 years in the ground.
  • as is so true of almost any archaeological area of study, more research is needed.


Robert Browne and his wife washing artifacts









1 of 4 screen fulls of artifacts that were recovered during the two days of work at our Public Archaeology Day in August of 2012


Peter Davis and Jamie Hunter work on their manicures

Ron and Peter scrubbing

Ron exams the washed crop of arifacts



No comments: