Tag Archives: orders and invoices

The Archaeology of Pins

By Eleanor Breen / Project Manager, Archaeological Collections Online If you excavate a domestic feature on a historic site and use waterscreening and floatation to recover small finds, you are likely to find plenty of straight pins.  This is especially true … Continue reading

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Pinning it down

By Eleanor Breen / Project Manager, Archaeological Collections Online Our research strategy for studying artifacts from the South Grove Midden usually follows a consistent pattern.  We begin by cataloguing the artifacts into our database and do some initial research using secondary … Continue reading

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Understanding Umbrellas – Some Context for the Umbrella Tip Artifact

By Eleanor Breen / Project Manager, Archaeological Collections Online It’s amazing how much can be said about a single artifact!  In two earlier blog posts, we discussed the disputed identification of the mystery artifact and how we came to the conclusion … Continue reading

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Putting a Pin in it!

By Eleanor Breen / Project Manager, Archaeological Collections Online Following along from our blog from last week – from pin holders to the actual pins themselves… Would you believe that from 1760 through the beginning of the Revolutionary War, George … Continue reading

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Fanning the Flames of Fashion

By Eleanor Breen / Project Manager, Archaeological Collections Online On August 6th, 1768, George Washington recorded the weather of that day: “Exceeding hot – & still till the Evening.” Sound familiar? Whether you visited Mount Vernon today or in the … Continue reading

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Thunder Bowls and Piss Pots

Abby Cliff/Graduate Student/SUNY Binghamton It is a truth universally acknowledged that in polite conversation, whether in the eighteenth century or the twenty first, one does not talk much about chamber pots, privies, or any related topic. Chamber pots were an … Continue reading

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“I should be glad to have a label…”: George Washington’s Trunk Plate

By Laura Tancredi / Archaeology Laboratory Manager One of the most exciting finds from the South Grove Midden was a small brass trunk plate inscribed “Genl Washington”.  Personally-attributable artifacts are hard to come by in archaeology, so this trunk plate … Continue reading

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Archaeologists and Their Fascination with Beads

By Eleanor Breen / Project Manager, Archaeological Collections Online Beads are one of the more fascinating artifact types that historical archaeologists find, catalogue, analyze, and interpret.  They’re tiny, shiny, colorful artifacts worn on jewelry, around necks or dangling from ears, … Continue reading

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The Long and the Short of It (Tobacco Pipes, That Is)

Katie Barca / M.A. Anthropology / George Washington University About this time last June, I was working on my first blog about the tobacco pipes from the Midden. I had only been studying the tobacco pipes for a few months … Continue reading

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Of “midlg size & not Deep:” Milk Pans for the Every Man

By Eleanor Breen / Project Manager, Archaeological Collections Online While the 22 milk pans from the South Grove excavation provide important tangible details about the material and sizes, they are only a small fraction of George Washington’s milk pans.  The invoices … Continue reading

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