Exchanging Medieval Material Culture Studies on archaeology and ...

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Hans L. Janssen & Eddie Nijhof
fig. 4 Excavation Pieterskerk (dbpk)
1984. Location and numbering of the
excavation trenches. 1: concrete
20th-century offi ce blocks;
2: plan of the Pieterskerk demolished
in 1983; 3: presently (2009) built-up
area. Drawing F.C. Schipper (bam),
Municipality of ’s-Hertogenbosch.
before or to a house of which no trace remains. Th e date of the
cesspit was diffi cult to determine, as the content delivered,
apart from cess37, almost no datable material. Th e most probable
date, however, is the beginning of the 15th century38.
A surprise was the occurrence of pits, fi lled with wasters of pottery
production in the most southern excavation trench, a few
metres to the west of the cesspit F-33. Th is led to an extension
of this trench to the south-west (fi g. 4: VIII; fi g. 5; fi g. 7). Here
the remains of kilns and a house, possibly the potter’s dwelling,
were encountered (fi g. 5, 7-12). Th is whole strip of land was
37 For a botanical analysis of the cess, see van Haaster 2008, 29-30.
situated between two branches of the river Aa, one of which
functioned originally as harbour, the other, before the extension
of the town wall, as town ditch (fi g. 6).
Within the excavation the traces of pottery production were
limited to a narrow strip to the south of the church, jammed
between the destructed archaeological layers caused by the
1983 demolition of the church on the one side and the destruction
by the new buildings of the sixties and seventies on the
other side. Within this narrow strip of approximately 1 m wide
the remains of two kilns were excavated (F225 and F241) and
38 Th e only datable object was an early-15th-century iron rowel-spur with a rowel with an extreme large number (at least 30) of points (Kempkens 1988, 80-81).