Roads, Rails, and Trails - Secretary of the Commonwealth

The lower part of the pot was decorated using a
technique called cord-marking, in which the not yet dry clay is
pressed or beaten with a paddle wrapped with textile or cord.
This creates a textured surface that is a bit easier to grip and
adds both visual and tactile interest. The neck and rim were
decorated by stamping the still wet clay with a comb-like tool
with closely-spaced triangular teeth. The potter made two
bands of parallel lines not quite perpendicular to the vessel rim.
This vessel is roughly similar to vessels found on islands in
Boston Harbor and on Martha’s Vineyard. It is markedly
different from vessels from the same period found at sites
around Narragansett Bay and the Taunton River. So it looks
like this visit to the site was from people with connections to
the east.
What about the other pot? The one from Feature 8 that
dated from the 1600s? That pot was very different. For one
thing, the temper was not shell, but finely crushed rock, also
known as “grit." The vessel was made by slab construction, in
which a potter makes flat slabs of clay, sticks them together,
and fuses them by holding a stone or block of wood on the
inside and beating the outside with a paddle. The potter adds
slabs and beats them in until she has the size and shape vessel
she wants. Archaeologists can recognize this construction
technique by the way the sherds break along the seams of the
slabs. This was also a fairly small vessel; the mouth had a
diameter of five and a half inches. It had thick walls around the
neck and rim, which thinned out a bit in the rounded body. The
inside and outside surfaces of this vessel were smoothed before
it dried. The potter was especially careful to smooth it around
the neck area before starting the final decorative procedure, in
which she chose to cut wide, shallow grooves arranged in rows
both parallel and diagonal to the rim. She also made small
notches around the inside and outside of the rim.
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This sherd is from a vessel dated to the 1600s. It has fine grit
temper and was decorated by incising sets of lines around the
rim and neck of the vessel.
These simple but graceful decorative motifs are
common throughout southern New England and beyond during
this period. Their meanings are not obvious; archaeologists
cannot "read" anything as simple as tribal, village, or clan
membership in pottery decorations. Each pot, humble or fancy,
represents a unique event, in which a person, almost certainly a
woman, made a vessel that had to function as a practical
cooking pot but could also express something to those who saw
it. To achieve this goal, she made a series of technical and
aesthetic choices, blending available clays and tempers,
building the vessel, and treating or decorating the surface based
on her knowledge of traditions, symbols, and meanings. When
we look at one of those potsherds, we get an indirect glimpse
into that world of humble function and subtle symbol. No
wonder archaeologists like pottery so much!