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John Bedell ARCHAEOLOGY ANDPROBATEINVENTORIESJOHNBEDELL

Archaeology and Probate Inventories in the

Study of Eighteenth-Century Life Historians have usedmany kinds of records to study the material world of the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries, including paintings, letters, dia-ries, and wills. In recent years, however, they have concentratedon probate inventorieslists of peoples possessions compiled justafter their death. Probate inventories were rst taken for estateand tax purposes in many parts of Europe during the later MiddleAges, and later in colonial America. Sometimes these lists aredetailed, itemizing chairs, pots, pigs, and even bags. They providea window into the homes of people who lived and died long ago.Among the issues that historians have used inventories to studyare standards of living, overall wealth, self-sufciency, economicdiversication, the transition from frontier to settled community,and, through the presence of clocks, the spread of our modern,regimented way of using time. Comparisons have been madeacross class lines, between England and Maryland, and betweenrural areas and towns.1

Historians have discussed at some length the possible prob-lems with the age bias and wealth bias of samples, but the con-

John Bedell is Archaeologist, The Louis Berger Group, Washington, D.C. He is the author

of Memory and Proof of Age in England, 12721327, Past & Present, 162 (1999), 327.

The author wishes to thank the many people whose assistance made this research

possible, including Kevin Cunningham, Ingred Wuebber, Meta Janowitz, Marie-Lorraine

Pipes, Gerard Scharfenberger, Eric Grifths, Robert Jacoby, Doug Tilley, Rick Vernay,Charles LeeDecker, and the Delaware Department of Transportation.

1 Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh. The Standard of Living in the Colonial

Chesapeake, William & Mary Quarterly, XLV (1988), 135159; idem, Changing Lifestyles

and Consumer Behavior in the Colonial Chesapeake, in Cary Carson, Robert Hoffman,

and Peter Albright (eds.), Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century

(Charlottesville, 1994), 59166; Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American

Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1980); Gloria Main, The Standard of Living

in Southern New England, 16401773, William & Mary Quarterly, XLV (1988), 124134;

Carole Shammas, The Pre-industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990); Ad van

der Woude and Anton Schuurman (eds.), Probate Inventories: A New Source for the Historical

Study of Wealth, Material Culture, and Agricultural Development (Wageningen, 1980); Lorna

Weatherill, Consumer Behavior and Material Culture in Britain, 16601760 (New York, 1988);James P. P. Horn, Adapting to a New World: A Comparative Study of Local Society in

2000 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of

Interdisciplinary History.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History,xxxi:2 (Autumn, 2000), 223245.

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sensus seems to be that such documents are accurate. Weatherillwrote that English inventories normally give a full account ofhousehold contents. But do they? They may look precise and

complete, but such documents can be wrong. Most classes ofeighteenth-century documents cannot readily be checked, butprobate inventories can, at least in part, by comparing them withthe ndings of archaeology. The comparison shows that probateinventories were often incomplete, omitting many items of lowvalue, such as earthenware dishes, sewing gear, and childrens toys.A better understanding of eighteenth-century material life can begained by using inventories in conjunction with archaeology,rather than through either one alone.2

In order to appreciate the strengths and weakness of botharchaeology and probate inventories, it is necessary to comparethe two kinds of sources in the most direct way possible. A good

data set for doing so now exists in Delaware, where twelveeighteenth-century farm sites have been thoroughly and profes-sionally excavated in the past fteen years (Table 1). All of thesites are in New Castle and Kent Counties, which comprise thenorthern half of the state, and most of the excavations have beensponsored by the Delaware Department of Transportation. Thesesites provide a large and relatively homogeneous body of data forthe study of one regions eighteenth-century material culture.They include tenant and owner-occupied farms, the status of theoccupants ranging from low at the Augustine Creek North Site

England and Maryland, 16501700, in Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo (eds.),

Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill, 1988), 133175; Elizabeth A. Perkins, The Con-sumer Frontier: Household Consumption in Early Kentucky,Journal of American History,

LXXVIII (1991), 486510; Paul A. Shackel, Personal Discipline and Material Culture(Knoxville,

1993); Shammas, How Self-Sufcient Was Early America?Journal of Interdisciplinary History,

XIII (1982), 247272; Walsh, Urban Amenities and Rural Sufciency: Living Standards and

Consumer Behavior in the Colonial Chesapeake, 16431777, Journal of Economic History,

XLIII (1983), 109117.

2 Main, The Correction of Biases in Colonial American Probate Records, Historical

Methods Newsletter, 8 (1974), 1028; Jones, Estimating the Wealth of the Living from a

Probate Sample,Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XIII (1982), 273300; Weatherill, Consumer

Behavior, 4; Franoise Piponnier, Inventaires Bourguignons (XIVeXVe sicle), in van der

Woude and Schuurman (eds.), Probate Inventories, 127139; Walsh, Consumer Behavior, Diet,

and the Standard of Living in Late Colonial and Early Antebellum America, 17701840, in

Robert E. Gallman and John Joseph Wallis (eds.), American Economic Growth and Standards of

Living Before the Civil War(Chicago, 1992), 217261; Anne Yentsch, Minimum Vessel Lists

as Evidence of Change in Folk and Courtly Traditions of Food Use, Historical Archaeology,XXIV (1990), 2453.

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to the bottom end of the upper class at the William StricklandPlantation and the McKean/Cochran Farm. Since all but one ofthe sites dates later than 1724, the data on the early part of thecentury is weak, but for the 1740 to 1800 period, the informationis rich. All of the excavations were accompanied by detailed titleresearch, and the occupants of several sites have been identied.

The survival of probate inventories from four of the sites permitsa direct comparison between the ndings of archaeology and theinventory lists.3

Separate probate inventory studies have also been done aspart of the work on some sites, and this data can be used tocompare archaeology and inventory studies within the Delawarecontext. Two studies are particularly useful. A sample of 200randomly selected inventories from New Castle County, focusingon the 1720 to 1740, 1760 to 1769, and 1790 to 1799 periods,was analyzed as part of the work on the Augustine Creek North

3 Summary descriptions of all sites are provided in Bedell, Historic Context: The Archaeology

of Farm and Rural Dwelling Sites in New Castle and Kent Counties, Delaware, 17301770 and17701830 (East Orange, N.J., 1999), 3242.

Table 1 List of Excavated Eighteenth-Century Sites in Delaware

site date typedate of

inventory

John Powell 16901735 FarmAugustine Creek South 17261760 FarmWilliam Strickland 17261760 Farm 1754Thomas Dawson 17351756 Farm 1754Augustine Creek North 17501810 Tenant Farm or

DwellingCharles Robinson 17621783 Farm 1776McKean/Cochran I 17501790 Tenant FarmBenjamin Wynn 17651822 Tenant Farm and

Blacksmiths ShopWhitten Road 17601830 Tenant FarmWilliam Hawthorne 17601900 Farm 1789Bloomsbury 17611814 Tenant Farm

Occupied by

Native AmericansDarrach Store 17751860 Store, then TenantHouse

McKean/Cochran II 17901830 Farm

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and South sites. A second study of 190 randomly selected KentCounty probate inventories, most of them from the 1740s, 1750s,and 1760s, was done as part of the work on the Thomas Dawson

site. Because these studies followed the general methods of Carr,Walsh, and Main, the data should be roughly comparable withtheir results from New England and the Chesapeake.4

Archaeologists employ inventory studies because they reportmany items that usually do not turn up at archaeological sitesforinstance, objects that rot away in the ground, such as clothing,bed linens, rugs, and books, as well as valuable objects that wererarely lost or thrown away, such as silver buckles and gold jewelry.In some ways, the evidence from inventories shows that thepicture provided by archaeology alone is not just incomplete butalso misleading. For example, the fact that archaeologists nd fewplates on farm sites that date before the introduction of creamware

in the 1760s, but that after 1770, they become common does notmean that farmers in Delaware did not use plates before 1760;they simply used pewter or wood plates that did not survive. Thedata from Kent County reveal that in the 1740s and 1750s, pewterdishes were listed in at least 75 percent of the inventories, eventhose of poor families. A picture of eighteenth-century life drawnentirely from archaeology would be incomplete.

Table 2 summarizes the ndings of the Kent County inven-tory study, as a point of comparison for the archaeological data tofollow. In general, the Delaware inventories are similar to thosefrom other parts of the thirteen colonies, telling us that the averagehouse was simply furnished. Beds, tables, chairs, and chests are the

only items of furniture listed for a majority of households. Somericher people also had desks, cupboards, or chests of drawers, butthey mainly had more beds, tables, chairs, and chests. Books seemto have been common, especially the Bible. The count of dairyitems (primarily churns) is surely too low, since the inventoriesalso show that almost all farmers kept dairy cows. More prosperousfarmers were much more likely to have more expensive tools like

4 Bedell et al., The Ordinary and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Delaware: Excavations at the

Augustine Creek North and South Sites (7NC-G-144 and 7NC-G-145) (Washington, D.C., 1998);

idem et al., An Ordinary Family in Eighteenth-Century Delaware: Excavations at the Thomas

Dawson Site (Washington, D.C., 1999); Carr and Walsh, Standard of Living Chesapeake;idem, Changing Lifestyles; Main, Standard of Living Southern New England.

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carts and cider mills, and some farmers probably supplementedtheir income by renting these items to their poorer neighbors.

The overall impression is that although a few people in theeighteenth century owned many things, many people did not.

Joseph Nixon, who died in 1750 left an estate valued at only 112s., as listed in Table 3. Nixon and his wife owned little beyond

Table 2 Presence of Selected Items in Kent County Probate Invento-ries, 17401769

total value of inventory

item less than 50 50 to 225more than

225

total number of cases 49 48 24

percent of households possessing

Household articlesBed/table linen 39 55 78Earthenware 71 85 83Teaware 31 53 87Metal pot 96 96 100Clock/watch 2 6 30Table forks 35 49 73Pewter 78 94 96Books 39 74 70

FurnitureBeds 100 100 100Tables 63 78 96Chairs 61 72 96Chests 78 98 91Desks 4 11 61Cupboards 10 19 39Dining tables 6 4 22

ToolsSpinning wheel 65 91 100Loom 10 23 39Dairy items 20 23 17Gun 35 57 87Wagon/cart 8 53 87Blacksmiths tools 8Carpenters tools 10 28 43Shoemakers tools 4 4 22Cider mill 6 30Still 17


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a table, three chairs, a chest, a trunk, some clothes, and a Bible.Their only luxury, if such it can be called, was a single mirror.Their kitchen was nished with a tea kettle, a mug with brownsugar, and old earthenware & tin. According to the inventories,a majority of poorer people did not have table forks, bed linens,or ne dishes; about one-quarter did not have pewter plates orcoarse earthenwares; and more than one-third did not even owna table. The only articles that almost everyone had were clothes,beds, and metal cooking pots. Only about one-half of middlingfarmers, those worth more than 50, had bed linens, teawares,

or table forks; 28 percent did not even own a chair. By ourstandards, and by the standards of the wealthy in their own time,the material goods of ordinary eighteenth-century people werefew and simple.

testing inventory data Although they are a valuable sourcefor learning about eighteenth-century life, inventories are notwithout their own problems. For one thing, they were the workof the deceaseds neighbors, who were appointed by the court.Little is known about how well these amateur assessors were ableto do this complex job. A study of inventories from various partsof the country suggests that they were taken according to unwrit-ten rules about what was countable and what was not. Inventories

Table 3 Inventory of Thomas Nixon, March 15, 1750

One bed & beddingWearing apparel

Widows wearing apparelLarge old BibleLooking glasssmall old tea kettle3 chairs1 chest with meal in it1 trunk with lumberhackled ax, 5 small pieces new linning and 1 corse towell2 old trowels & plum line & rule1 old mugg with some brown sugarOld earthenware & old tinn1 old piggin & snuff bottle2 turkeys

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from New England listed houses and land, but southern invento-ries did not. Those in Delaware tended to omit houses and land,but we have no idea why and according to whose decision.5

That a few Delaware inventories listed land suggests that someassessors did not fully grasp the local procedure. A few of the rulesin Delaware are inferable from the inventories. The inventoriesalmost always include the value of crops standing in the eld butnever the contents of gardens or apples on the tree. Small sumsof money hardly ever appear, although the inventories of richmen often list larger sums. The inventory takers, by commonconsent, may have refrained from listing items that were consid-ered the personal property of widows, such as clothing, sewingkits, and purses. What were the rules that caused people to omitother items that may not appear?6

Another possible difculty with inventories is fraud perpe-

trated by heirs, executors, and other interested parties. One studyof a group of Maryland inventories dating to the 1670s producedevidence of systematic under-valuation, probably to conceal assetsfrom creditors and competing heirs.7

Historians frequently employ inventories to estimate the stan-dard of living in the past, primarily by counting how manyinventories include selected objectsfrom essentials like cookingpots to luxuries like silver plate. In the manner of Table 2 herein,such studies may try to nd out how the number of people whoowned these things changed over time. Carr and Walsh havecreated what they call an amenities index to study the level ofcomfort in colonial Virginia and Maryland, and Main has applied

the same technique to New England.8

The amenities list contains twelve items that are intended torepresent the range of goods, from necessity to luxury. Amongthe items chosen are bed or table linen, table forks, books, andsilver plate. The number of times that these items appear in

5 Carr and Walsh, Inventories and the Analysis of Wealth and Consumption Patterns in

St. Marys County, Maryland, 16581777, Historical Methods, XIII (1980), 81104; Jones,

Estimating the Wealth, 277282.

6 Micheline Baulant, Typologie des Inventaires Apres Dcs, in van der Woude and

Schuurman (eds.), Probate Inventories, 3342.

7 Karma Paape, Providence: A Case Study in Probate Manipulation, 16701679, Maryland

Historical Magazine, 94 (1999), 6587.

8 Carr and Walsh, Standard of Living Chesapeake, 136138; Main, Standard of LivingSouthern New England, 126127.


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inventories shows that they became more common in all areas,among all income groups, from 1650 to 1775. These inventorystudies suggest, therefore, that standards of living were rising for

most people in the colonies. Questions about the accuracy ofinventories, however, create difculties for such a straightforwardapproach. Simple errors by the assessors would presumably averageout over time, given the large number of inventories available forstudy, but systematic distortions would be more recalcitrant. If theunwritten rules changed over time and some items were countedmore often, or less often, the usefulness of these inventory sum-maries for studying long-term change would be greatly under-mined. One way to check their accuracy is to compare them toavailable archaeological records.

The radically different origins of archaeological deposits andprobate inventories raises questions about the value of a direct

comparison. An inventory was supposed to be a complete list ofall the objects present on a particular day. An archaeologicaldeposit is created over years, or even decades of trash disposal,though it may represent only a small percentage of the materialthrown away on the site. In general, the only artifacts still iden-tiable after 250 years in the ground are those that were depositedin a protected environment, such as a well or cellar hole. Refusesimply strewn on the ground has generally been too pulverizedby trampling and plowing for archaeologists to learn anythingfrom it. (All but one of the sites in the Delaware sample had beenplowed; the exception was occupied into the 1950s.) On ruraleighteenth-century sites, most trash seems to have been broad-

cast in yard areas, not thrown into pits.9

Even when intact deposits have been identied, archaeolo-gists usually do not know how many years of occupation theyrepresent, or what part of the trash thrown away ended up inthem. Furthermore, not everything used on a site was thrownaway. Some items were regularly broken and discarded and othersmaintained for decades. Pewter was recycled; silver kept as an

9 Lu Ann De Cunzo et al., Final Archaeological Investigations at the John Darrach Store Site,

Delaware Route 6Woodland Beach Road, Smyrna Section, Delaware Route 1 Corridor, Kent County,

Delaware (Dover, Del., 1992), 149167; James F. Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: The

Archaeology of Early American Life (New York, 1977), 125126; David J. Grettler et al.,

Landowner and Tenant Opportunity in Seventeenth Century Central Delaware: Final Archaeological

Investigations at the Richard Whitehart (7K-C-203C) and John Powell (7K-C-203-H) Plantations,State Route 1 Corridor, Kent County, Delaware(Dover, Del., 1995), 144153.

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heirloom. Eighteenth-century blacksmiths accounts refer to re-pairs made on simple metal tools, such as pitchforks and sickles.Because of these difculties, no denitive statement about the

quantitative relationship between goods listed in inventories andarchaeological nds is now possible. Most likely, a few breakablebut durable items, especially ceramics, may be better representedarchaeologically, but most categories are more likely to appear ininventories.10

ceramics Two of the twelve items tracked by the Carr andWalsh amenities index are coarse earthenware and renedearthenware. Their gures show a steadily increasing percentageof households owning ceramics, indicating a rising level of com-fort, but there are reasons to be skeptical about these numbers. Inthe New Castle County, Delaware, sample for the 1760s, ceramics

were listed in only 67 percent of the inventories for the middlinghouseholds worth between 50 and 225, but they were foundon every site in the Delaware sample (Table 4). In fact, they areubiquitous in the archaeological record of colonial America, ap-pearing on every domestic site that archaeologists have investi-gated.

The archaeological record for the colonial period, on whichmost inventory studies have been focused, contains an enormousamount of coarse earthenware. (In some parts of the country, itbecame rare after 1780.) Moreover, every colonial plantation,tenant farm, urban tenement, and slave quarter that has ever beentested has yielded sherds of it, in most cases by the thousands.

Rened earthenware is a more difcult category; it is not clearthat we divide coarse from rened wares in the way thateighteenth-century potters or inventory takers did. Carr, Walsh,and Main say nothing about stoneware, some of which wastreated like rened earthenware and some like coarse earthen-ware, further complicating the picture. Because Delawares inven-tories rarely specify ceramic types before the 1770s, it is difcultto make any comparisons. However, what contemporary archae-ologists consider rened ware has been recovered from most

10 Wade P. Catts et al., The Archaeology of Rural Artisans: Final Investigations at the Mermaid

Blacksmith and Wheelwright Shop Sites, State Route 7Limestone Road, New Castle County,Delaware(Dover, Del., 1994), 916.


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eighteenth-century sites, including all of the Delaware sites in oursample.11

The discrepancy between the ubiquity of ceramics in the

archaeology and their frequent omissions from inventories wasnoticed by French scholars more than twenty years ago, but mosthistorians have not heeded the warning. They have continued toprint numbers suggesting that many households, even wealthyones, owned little or no pottery. Main reported that in ruralMassachusetts, in the 1725 to 1749 period, only 69 percent ofhouseholds worth more than 225 owned coarse earthenware,and only 31 percent owned rened ware. Ceramics are so poorlyrepresented in the inventories that not even new and exoticceramic forms necessarily appear. Yentsch found that orientalporcelain teawares appear on archaeological sites in theChesapeake by 1680, but their rst listing in surviving Virginia

probate inventories does not occur until 1717.12

Since all of the inventories for excavated sites in Delawarelist ceramics, we have no basis for an archaeological comparison.(William Peerys inventory, made in 1789, lists only a lot ofdishes, but this vague designation certainly could include earth-enware.) However, some inventories itemize ceramic dishes, andwe can compare them to what was found in the ground. WilliamStrickland, whose family occupied his plantation from c. 1726 to1760, worked his way up from the bottom half of taxables in thecounty to the 90th percentile (such movement was not unusualin his time). After his heirs left within a few years of his death,the site probably had no other occupants. His inventory, taken in

1754, lists no more than nineteen ceramic vessels (Table 5). Usinga technique called Minimum Vessel Analysis, which determinesthe smallest number of vessels that could have produced the sherdsfound in the ground, archaeologists identied 237 from the siteof his farm (Table 6). The archaeological sample includes at leastve types of vessels not listed in the inventory. These includemugs and chamber pots, two items that are archaeologically ubiq-

11 Bedell et al., Farm Life on the Appoquinimink: Excavation of the McKean/Cochran Farm Site,

New Castle County, Delaware(Dover, Del., 1999).

12 Piponnier, Inventaires, 136; Main, Standard of Living Southern New England;Yentsch,A Chesapeake Family and Their Slaves (New York, 1994).


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uitous but rare in inventories, as well as plates, porringers, andcups.13

The inventory of Charles Robinson, a yeoman whose farmwas occupied from c. 1762 to 1783, lists Tea delph ware one

Nip [bowl] & 3 plates and 3 earthen pots and 3 old pans Jug &3 bottles. Both the written record and archaeological evidencesuggest that the house was never the property of anyone exceptRobinson and his wife, who died in 1783. Nevertheless, archae-ologists found at least 528 vessels at his farm, including 58 teacups, 52 saucers, and dozens American-made dishes or pie plates.The apparent detail of this inventory is misleading; many objectshave obviously been omitted from this precise-looking list. Al-though we cannot check them archaeologically, some of the

13 Ellis C. Coleman et al., Phase III Data Recovery Excavations of the William M Hawthorn

Site, 7NC-E-46 (Dover, Del., 1994), 226; Catts et al., Final Archaeological Investigations at the

William Strickland Plantation Site (7K-A-117), A Mid-Eighteenth Century Farmstead, State Route 1Corridor, Kent County, Delaware(Dover, Del., 1995), 1823, 46, 145.

Table 5 Ceramics Listed in William Stricklands Probate Inventory

To 2 bowls & a Cheese Pat 2:0To 5 Old pots and 2 Old frying pans & Skillet 5:0

To 6 Earthen pans 3:0To 6 Old Earthen pots 4:0To Teaware & some Bowles 12:0

Table 6 Ceramics Identied Archaeologically at the William StricklandSite

total vessels 237

tea cups 19 dishes 8saucers 10 serving plates 3teapots 3 jars 4posset cups 8 pots 2plates 26 milk pans 23porringers 4 butter pots 11mugs/jugs 41 ointment pots 4mush cups 2 chamber pots 9small bowls 24 childs toy cup 1large bowls 15 unidentied 20

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inventories in the Kent County study seem to have the sameproblem. The inventory of John Virden, a substantial farmer whodied in 1769, mentions ceramics, but this simple fact betrays the

obvious inadequacy of the list that his assessors provided, whichincludes 6 earthen potts, 5 full of lard, 3 earthen pots, 2 full ofshugr, and 3 earthen potts with dirty fatt, but no pans, dishes,bowls, or teacups.14

The ceramics found in eight well-dated archaeological de-posits from Delaware are listed in Table 7. These deposits are asclose to being time capsules as the archaeological sample permits,since they were all probably created in a decade or less, probablyby a single household. Table 7 provides some idea of the largeamounts of ceramics used and discarded on eighteenth-centuryfarms within ten or so years. The John Powell, Augustine CreekSouth, and Thomas Dawson sites were small, owner-occupied

farms. Dawsons 1754 probate inventory valued his goods at 50.Strickland was somewhat wealthierhis goods and chattels beingvalued at 189but not really of the elite. The Benjamin Wynn(a blacksmith) Site was a tenant farm occupied from about 1765to 1820, by Wynn himself between 1775 and 1800. The occupantsof the McKean/Cochran Farm in the 1750 to 1790 period weretenants, but the farm was large (c. 400 acres), and the tenants seemto have been well above average in wealth. The ceramic collec-tions from these deposits, all generated by typical households,show a substantial number of vessels and a great variety of vesselforms, as well as a wide range of different materialsfrom Chineseporcelain to coarse, locally made earthenware.15

The Augustine Creek North Site was a small tenant farmlocated on sloping ground next to a swampy stream, an undesir-able location that strongly suggests that its occupants were poor.Two collections of artifacts were identied archaeologically, onedating to the 1750s or 1760s and one dating to about 1800. Theearlier material (Table 7), which was better preserved, included

14 Ronald A. Thomas, Robert F. Hoffman, and Betty C. Zeeboker, Archaeological Data

Recovery of the Charles Robinson Plantation, 17621781, Appoquinimink Hundred, New Castle

County, Delaware, unpub. ms. (Delaware State Historical Preservation Ofce, Dover, 1994).

15 Bedell et al., Ordinary and the Poor; idem et al., Ordinary Family; idem et al., Farm Life;

Catts et al., William Strickland Plantation; Grettler et al., Marginal Farms on the Edge of Town:

Final Archaeological Investigations at the Moore-Taylor, Benjamin Wynn (Lewis-E), and Wilson-Lewis

Farmsteads, State Route 1 Corridor, Kent County, Delaware (Dover, Del., 1996); idem et al.,Landowner and Tenant Opportunity.


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Table 7 Well-Dated Ceramic Collections from Eighteenth-CenturyArchaeological Sites in Delaware

site and feature

time frame

of deposit contents of depositJohn Powell well 17101720 10 mugs, 2 cups, 4 plates, 1

small bowl, 1 jug, 1 milk pan, 5jars, 1 bottle, 1 ointment pot

William Stricklandwell

17251750 3 teacups, 2 saucers, 3 teapots, 8plates, 4 porringers, 3 smallbowls, 11 mugs, 7 cups, 10 largebowls, 3 pitchers, 10 jugs, 5 jars,7 pots, 9 milk pans, 4 chamberpots

Augustine CreekSouth cellar

17451755 29 teacups, 36 saucers, 8 teapots,6 plates, 17 small bowls, 17porringers, 27 mugs, 3 cups, 15

jars, 8 milk pans, 1 pipkin, 18

dishes, 4 jugs, 3 chamber potsThomas Dawsoncellar

17451755 29 tea cups, 17 saucers, 7teapots, 1 creamer, 3 plates, 16small bowls, 7 porringers, 11mugs, 7 jars, 4 jugs, 16 milkpans, 11 dishes, 8 pans, 2 largebowls, 2 chamber pots, 17unidentied/other

Augustine CreekNorth root cellar

17501760 1 small bowl, 1 porringer, 8mugs, 1 jar, 1 milk pan, 4 dishes,1 pan, 1 ointment pot

McKean/Cochrancellar

17501770 5 teacups, 7 saucers, 9 bowls, 8porringers, 2 mugs, 10 cups, 5

jars, 6 milk pans, 1 colander, 5dishes, 5 pans, 4 jugs, 2 chamber

pots, 1 ointment pot, 6unidentied/other

McKean/Cochranwell

17501770 8 teacups, 12 saucers, 1 teapot, 1plate, 2 platters, 3 small bowls, 2porringers, 5 mugs, 5 jars, 9 milkpans, 1 pipkin, 5 dishes, 7 pans,1 jug, 2 large bowls, 1 chamberpot, 11 unidentied/other

Benjamin Wynnwell

17651785 8 teacups, 5 saucers, 5 teapots, 1cup, 10 plates, 3 platters, 4 smallbowls, 1 mug, 4 jugs, 6 largebowls, 3 jars, 1 milk pan, 1pitcher, 1 pan

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coarse earthenware milk pans and jars, slip-decorated dishes, andat least ten ceramic mugs. The later material included severalcreamware plates, hand-painted pearlware teacups and saucers in

oral designs, and at least one teapot. Late eighteenth-centuryslave-quarter sites that have been excavated in Virginia have alsoyielded substantial numbers of ceramics, including rened earth-enware teacups, and hand-painted teacups have also been foundat the homes of tenant farmers on the Appalachian frontier.16

Teacups are of particular importance to social historians; theydocument the spread of both a new product and a new style ofetiquette. Inventory studies show that in the later eighteenthcentury, at least half of American households were consuming tea.Archaeology suggests that in Delaware the gure was even higher.Israel Acrelius, writing about 1750, said that in Delaware, tea wasbeing drunk in the most remote cabins, and archaeological

discoveries imply that he was not exaggerating. Although teawaresare absent from some deposits, notably the pre-1790 deposits atAugustine Creek North, all of the sites in the Delaware sampledating to the second half of the eighteenth century yieldedteawares from every period, including well-dated, eighteenth-century deposits at the Benjamin Wynn, Whitten Road, andBloomsbury tenant-farm sites. Deposits securely dated to thelifetime of Thomas Dawson include several high-quality teawarevessels. Teawares are so common in British North America thatnearly all archaeologists use Josiah Wedgewoods creamware andpearlware, which usually appear rst as teawares, to date deposits.Studies based on the presence of teawares in probate inventories

are likely to underestimate the rapidity with which tea drinkingspread through the population.17

16 Bedell et al., Ordinary and the Poor; Bedell, Michael Petraglia, and Christopher Plummer,

Status, Technology, and Rural Tradition in Western Pennsylvania: Excavations at the

Shaeffer Farm Site, Northeast Historical Archaeology, XXIII (1994), 2957; William M. Kelso,

Kingsmill Plantations, 16191800: Archaeology of Country Life in Colonial Virginia (New York,

1984); Theresa A. Singleton (ed.), The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life (Orlando,

1985).

17 Timothy H. Breen, Baubles of Britain: The American and Consumer Revolutions of

the Eighteenth Century, Past & Present, 119 (1988), 73104, 83; Mark Shaffer et al., Final

Phase III Investigations of the Whitten Road Site, 7NC-D-100, Whitten or Walther Road, New

Castle County, Delaware(Dover, Del., 1988); Shammas, The Domestic Environment in Early

Modern England and America, in Michael Gordon, (ed.), The American Family in Social-

HistoricalPerspective (New York, 1983), 125; Walsh, Consumer Behavior, Diet, and Standardof Living.


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Why are ceramics omitted from so many inventories if theyare so archaeologically ubiquitous? Probably for the simple reasonthat they were not worth much money. Even new earthenware

vessels cost less than a shilling; inventories assign them values aslow as one penny. In Delaware inventories, wooden ware (suchas buckets) was often valued at more than the earthernware. Themain purpose of inventories was to provide a guide for thedivision of estates, and heirs were not likely to quarrel over a fewmilk pans. For this very reason, inventories rarely list pins, scissors,thimbles, and razors, which archaeologists nd on almost everysite. Some Delaware inventories, the work of extraordinarily con-scientious appraisers, contain lists of earthenware that resemble thecollections found on archaeological sites. For example, the inven-tory of John Tilton, a Kent County tenant farmer who died in1746, lists two jugs, three butter pots, one earthen pan, ve old

earthen porringers, one small earthen vessel, three earthen plates,a one-pint drinking pot, two pint and a half drinking pots, twoearthen cups, and one saucer. Even John Amyatt, a poor KentCounty shoemaker, whose estate was valued at less than 20 in1744, owned six dishes, six plates, one basin, two bowls, fourearthen pans, four porringers, and nine plates, as well as eightwooden trenchers.18

But if earthenwares were so commonplace, why are theylisted more often in the households of the rich, and why do theyget more common over time? Two factors probably contributeto these trends. First, the more earthenware people had, the morelikely appraisers were to note it. A bowl or two could easily be

placed in a category like lumber, or small things forgotten,but by the middle of the 1700s, rich farmers sometimes had wholerooms full of earthenware, including dozens of milk pans and large

jars. Rich farmers undoubtedly had more earthenware than poorones, but even ceramics became more common over the courseof the eighteenth century. Minimum vessel counts are frequentlyin the dozens for archaeological sites dating from c. 1700, but inthe hundreds for sites dating from the 1750s and later. Indeed, theincreased reporting of earthenware reects real differences, both

18 For the relative values of wooden- and earthenware, see Delaware State Archives, Dover;

New Castle County Probate Files, John Corbett 1761 (Delaware probate les are indexedby county, name and date).

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over time and across social classes, in the ownership of dishes andpots.19

Factors internal to inventories also help to explain the in-

creased reporting. The Delaware inventories for rich householdsseem to have been more detailed than those for the poor, andinventories in general became more detailed throughout thecourse of the eighteenth century. These statements are difcult totest quantitatively, but numerous signs point toward this conclu-sion. Clothes are frequently itemized for the wealthy, sometimesin page-long lists of jackets, belts, handkerchiefs, and so on, butinventories of the poor usually say only clothing of the deceased.A detailed list is a natural response to the greater challenge pre-sented by a closet full of clothes, but it leads to problems incomparing the inventories of the rich with those of the poor:Since those for the poor itemize nothing, a simple count would

show that many more rich people had shirts, shoes, belts, andpants. Likewise, the inventories of the wealthy are more likely tospecify different types of ceramics, chairs, bed linens, and kitchenutensils, probably because these much larger collections of objectswould have been more difcult to compile during the valuation,as well as more difcult to divide among heirs.

The evidence for increasing rigor over time is less conclusive,but it is nevertheless suggestive. In Delaware, the oldest preservedinventories, dating from the 1690s, are extremely sketchy andsparse. General terms like lumber and household trumperygrow less common after the early 1700s. The rst inventories thatdescribe different types of ceramics, as opposed to just crockery

or earthenware, date from the 1770s, as does the rst inventoryto list books by title. Several historians have elsewhere notedlong-term trends in inventories level of detail. Schuurman, forone, observed that Dutch inventories gradually became less de-tailed over the course of the nineteenth century. Any study oflong-term social trends must take into consideration the possibilitythat the sources change with society.20

19 Deetz, Ceramics from Plymouth, 16201835: The Archaeological Evidence, in Ian

M. G. Quimby (ed.), Ceramics in America: Winterthur Conference Report 1972 (Charlottesville,

1972), 1539.

20 Schuurman, Some Reections on the Use of Probate Inventories as a Source for the

Study of the Material Culture of the Zaanstreek in the Nineteenth Century, in van derWoude and Schuurrnan (eds.), Probate Inventories, 177189.


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Probate inventories are complex documents, each one differ-ent from the next. Some are detailed; some are not. Some describea particular group of possessions in great detail, such as clothing

or livestock, and lump other groups into general categories. Muchof the richness of the inventories is lost when they are reducedto simple statistical summaries. As noted, some inventories providelists of ceramics that tally well with the archaeological data, andmore could be learned about ceramic use in Delaware from thesedetailed inventories than from a statistical summary of the manysketchy lists. The argument is not that inventories are all wrong,only that most of them were never intended to be complete. Theyreect, in a general way, broad changes in the ownership of manyitems, as well as broad economic trends. But inventory reportstestify to not just the presence of the item but also to its value,as well as to the number of items and the level of detail in the

inventory. A graph showing that the percentage of householdsowning earthenware rose during the period from 1650 to 1750means more than meets the eye when we know that the actualvalue in all periods was close to 100 percent. Presence/absencetables may be informative about the ownership of expensivethings, like silver plate or looms, but they are not as trustworthyabout cheap items like earthenware.

other household goods Archaeology suggests that otherkinds of household goods are also underreported in the probateinventories. Sewing items, such as thimbles and scissors, havealready been mentioned. Childrens toys are also rarely listed; a

study of inventories might lead one to think that eighteenth-cen-tury children had none. Most toys were made of perishablematerials, such as wood, but a few kinds, such as ceramic marblesand toy-sized cups, regularly turn up at archaeological sites. Chil-drens clothes receive little attention in the inventories. Assessorsmay have viewed childrens clothes and toys as the childrens andnot part of the householders estate. Three underreported itemsthat were denitely part of the adult world were chamber pots,spoons, and tobacco pipes (Table 4). No tobacco pipes are men-tioned in the 400 inventories of the Delaware sample, though theyhave been found on every eighteenth-century site that has beenexcavated in the state. Because they were cheap, their presenceor absence has few economic implications; it may, however, have

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cultural signicance. Compared with sites in the Delaware Valley,Chesapeake sites yield, on average, at least ve times as manytobacco pipe fragments. We do not know whether Delaware

Valley farmers smoked less than those in the Chesapeake, or theyused another kind of pipe, perhaps corn cob.21

Forks represent a special case, since they were not introducedinto the colonies until c. 1700. They are listed in all the inventoriesfor sites where they have been found archaeologically, but aninteresting pattern develops in the Delaware inventories. Thenumber of New Castle County inventories with forks peaks inthe 1760s and then declines in the 1790s. Shackel found the samepattern in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Data published byCarr and Walsh end with the year 1775, but they show that thenumber of households with forks may have peaked at that point.Since it is highly unlikely that the use of forks declined under the

early Republic, another explanation is needed. Figure 1 interpretsthe rise and fall of forks in the Delaware inventories as the productof two variables, the ownership of forks and the number ofappraisers who reported them. (The gure lumps all wealth groupstogether, but the trend holds for rich, poor, and middling house-holds.) When forks were rare and something of a luxury, appraisersprobably mentioned them most of the time that they were present.After they became ordinary objects, however, some appraisersbegan to ignore them, or to put them into categories like goodesin a chest. Even though forks were not expensive, the vagariesof their reporting suggest further difculties with inventories assources.22

The part that drinking glasses play in the inventories is alsosuggestive. Overall, about 20 percent of the Delaware inventorieslist them; the high point among wealthy households in the 1790swas 43 percent. In the 1750s, however, not one of the thirty-sixKent County inventories for households worth less than 50 listsa drinking glass even though they are common archaeologically.Stemmed glasses, the easiest kind to identify from small fragments,have been found at all four of our sites, including the home of

21 Bedell et al., Farm Life;idem et al., Ordinary and the Poor; Catts et al., William Strickland

Plantation; Coleman et al., Phase III; Schuurman, Some Reections, 136; Edward F. Heite

and Cara Lee Blume, Mitsawokett to Bloomsbury: The Archaeology and History of an Unrecognized

Indigenous Community in Central Delaware (Dover, Del., 1998).22 Shackel, Personal Discipline, 108; Carr and Walsh, Changing Lifestyles, 78.


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poor tenants at Augustine Creek North. The remains of at leastve stemmed glasses were found in one well at the John PowellSite, the home of a middling property owner; the well was lled

in about 1720.

23

There are even clearer conicts between inventories andarchaeological discoveries. William Stricklands inventory lists noglasses or glassware, but at least three stemmed glasses and onetumbler were found at the farm, as well as a glass candlestick.Likewise, no glasswares are listed in Charles Robinsons inventory,but archaeologists recovered fragments of glass tumblers and anopaque glass bowl. The values that inventory takers assigned tostemmed glasses and tumblers varied widely, presumably depend-ing on the quality and condition, but, on average, glasses werevalued at just under a shilling, about twice as expensive as earth-enware pans. Because they were highly breakable, it is possible

that all of Stricklands and Robinsons had been dropped and thefragments swept away before these men died. But whatever thereason, their absence from the inventories creates interpretivedifculties.

bones Archaeology agrees with inventories about the distri-bution of large farm animals. Cattle and pig bones have beenfound at every eighteenth-century site excavated in Delaware todate, and these animals are listed in most of the inventories. Wherecalculations are available, cattle seem to supply more meat thanpigs, although the fact that cattle bones are larger and survivebetter than pigs may bias the sample. Sheep are common, though

not as common as cattle or pigs, and their distribution is morevaried. Farmers differed widely in the number of sheep that theyraised and ate. Butchered horse bones have been found on mostDelaware sites, although in small quantities, indicating that horsemeat was eaten at least on occasion.24

Another discrepancy between inventories and archaeologyarises in the case of smaller animals. Fowles, as chickens weregenerally called, are listed in few Delaware inventories, butchicken bones have been found on all the sites excavated to date.Stricklands inventory lists no chicken or other fowles, butarchaeologists found 324 medium bird bones that were almost

23 Grettler et al., Landowner and Tenant Opportunity.24 Bedell et al., Ordinary Family; Bedell, Petraglia, and Plummer, Status, Technology, and

Rural Tradition; Walsh, Consumer Behavior, Diet, and Standard of Living.

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certainly chicken. Dawsons inventory also lists no birds, thoughchicken bones abounded in the major deposits at his farm.

Chickens seem to have been such a common feature of life

that hardly anyone bothered to notice them, especially not whenvaluing an estate. Russo found that in Talbot County, Maryland,chickens tended to be listed more often in the inventories ofwidows, suggesting that they were often considered the womenspersonal property. This trend, however, does not seem to hold inDelaware. Of the thirty-nine widows inventories in the Delawaresample, only two mention fowls, even though seventeen mentionother livestock.25

Bones from archaeological sites also show that hunting wascommon, especially of such small animals as squirrels, rabbits, andturtles. The bones of these animals have been bound on all of thesites with good collections. Fishing is indicated by the bones of

catsh and perch that were probably taken from streams with aline and hook.

Not one inventory in the Delaware sample lists a dog or acat. Although both animals breed prolically and could usually behad for free, a good hunting dog must have had some worth.Evidently, pets were not part of the inventory process. Dogs andcats were both common in eighteenth-century Delaware; theirbones have been found on all sites that yielded large collectionsof animal bones. The reason why their bones are not always inevidence is not because these animals were eaten, but becausewhen they died, their carcasses were thrown out with the rest ofthe trash. There is not much archaeological indication of pet

sentimentality in eighteenth-century rural America.26

the material culture of poverty Perhaps the biggest dif-ference between the inventories and the ndings of archaeologyconcerns the feeling or atmosphere that each conveys about lifein poor households. Descriptions based on inventories make thematerial life of the poor seem grim. For example, Four pots (twobroken) and pot hooks, skimmer, spit and dripping pan, and threeold pewter dishes accounted for all of the utensils and dishes withwhich Faulkners wife prepared and served the familys meals.

25 Jean Russo, Free Workers in a Plantation Economy: Talbot County, Maryland, 16901759

(New York, 1989), 31 n. 39.26 Schuurman did not nd dogs and cats listed in the nineteenth-century Dutch inventories

that he studied, although birds were (Some Reections, 136).


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Ceramics may have been cheap, but the addition of a dozen orso earthenware dishes and maybe a few wooden trenchers wouldmake a major difference in how we imagine life in the Faulkner

household. The archaeological ubiquity of ceramics demands thatwe make this addition.27

The ceramics from eighteenth-century archaeological sitesmay imply more than just the presence of unrecorded dishes. Thepotsherds found on the sites of tenant farms and slave quarters areoften brightly colored, and other decorative items, such as beadsand fancy buttons, also turn up from time to time. These objectsconvey a sense of beauty absent from the inventory lists. Becausethe clothes and dishes represented by those pretty buttons andcolorful potsherds may have been purchased already used, withtears or cracks, they may mean little in economic terms, but theymight have great import in cultural or psychological terms. They

suggest that the people who owned them were trying to beautifytheir lives in the ways they could afford. The occasional appear-ance of other inexpensive luxuries, such as stemmed glasses, jew-elry, and molded shoe buckles, supports this notion. Even themost utilitarian ceramics, such as American-made earthenwarepans and dishes, often had elaborate, slip-trailed patterns that madethem objects of style almost as much as kitchen utensils. In thelight of these small archaeological discoveries, the sheer meannessof the inventories gives way to a more lively and cheerful picture.28

Tea drinking was an aristocratic renement widely adoptedby poor and ordinary people, and, because it has been muchstudied, it provides a model for social and material ambitions.

Archaeology shows that tea drinking may have spread even morerapidly among poor farmers than the inventories suggest, sincesherds of teacups and teapots are abundant even on slave and poortenant sites by the late eighteenth century. Poor people seem tohave changed the meaning of tea, using tea time as a pick-me-upin the middle of their long work days, as well as a pleasantdiversion. But the desire to have ne tea equipment spread withthe tea-drinking habit. In the eighteenth century, teawares werethe nest and most expensive dishes on almost every site. By 1800,hand-painted pearlware teacups were common even in poor

27 Russo, Free Workers, 410.

28 Compare the statements made by Henry Glassie about the poor country people ofcontemporary Ireland in Passing the Time in Balleymenone (Bloomington, 1995), 361372.

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households. Archaeology shows that few people in eighteenth-century America were so poverty-stricken that they had no desire,or capacity, to keep up with fashions like tea drinking and to own

beautiful things.

29

A comparison of probate inventories and archaeological ndingsshows that neither, by itself, gives a complete picture of materiallife in the eighteenth century. Some kinds of information areavailable only from one of the two sources. The hunting of smallanimals, such as rabbits and turtles, is reected only in the bonesfound by archaeologists, whereas bed linens, books, and pewterdishes can be studied only through the inventories. On somequestions, the two data sets can be used to check each other.Archaeology can show that the probate lists of ceramics are in-complete, and the probate inventories can testify that the occa-

sional hammer or saw found by archaeologists represents manymore objects that never made it into the ground.

Even where they agree, archaeology and written recordsprovide a more detailed and nuanced picture together than apart.For example, both archaeology and the written records suggestthat most people lived in small, poorly built, wooden houses. Butthe written records indicate only the height of houses, the con-struction materials, and the number of rooms; archaeology givesthe dimensions of houses and reveals cellars, chimneys, glass win-dows, and other ne details. Combining archaeological data withprobate inventory studies is a better way to achieve a completeunderstanding of material life in colonial households.

The structure of contemporary scholarship, however, makessuch an interdisciplinary approach to the eighteenth centurydifcult. Archaeological data is rarely published in a form thathistorians can nd and employ; even historians studying ceramicsusually rely solely on documentary sources. When more archae-ological data is made available to historians, and more dialoguetakes place between practitioners of the two disciplines, a fullerand more sophisticated appreciation of eighteenth-century mate-rial life may begin to emerge. The data presented here are in-tended as a small step in that direction.

29 Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York,1986), 180183.


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