An Archaeological Perspective on the Hancock-Clarke Collection

Christa Beranek is a Historical Archaeologist at the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at U-Mass Boston. She has been working with the Society to evaluate the Hancock-Clarke collection and prepare it for exhibition. She also led the excavation at Munroe Tavern this summer, which you can read more about here.

I’ve worked with a number of archaeological collections in Massachusetts, and the Hancock-Clarke collection is really exceptional as a large body of material from place and period that are not very well represented. When I was writing my dissertation, I looked for collections from rural, 18^th-century, Massachusetts that I could use as comparative material for my site in Tyngsboro. What I found was that while there were large collections from urban areas (some unearthed during the Big Dig) and large collections from later 18^th-century sites (including some held at Minute Man National Park in Lexington), there were very few from the countryside outside Boston that dated to the first half of the 18^th century.

I’m not sure exactly why this is. It may be that these sites are still preserved and remain to be found, since the outer suburbs haven’t been subject to the same intensive development that the area closer to Boston has. It may also be that large collections from rural household in the early 18^th century are rare because these rural residents had relatively few things that would preserve to be found. Their houses may have been outfitted mostly with perishable materials: wooden trenchers, fiber storage baskets, wooden shutters on windows that had no glass panes.

Whatever the case, the collection from the Hancock household, with most items dating to before the 1740s, is unusual. The more than 20 boxes of glass, ceramic, and metal items offer an unparalleled view into the family’s house. Hancock’s position as a minister and his relationship to merchants in Boston meant that his family was probably better connected to urban markets and new goods and practices than most of their neighbors. Thus, the material that the Lexington Historical Society is curating is exceptional in two ways: it is a collection from an under represented time and place, and it comes from a household that would have stood out from its contemporaries.

I am extremely grateful for the chance to work on this collection. University students and staff from UMass Boston, and historical society staff, board members, and volunteers from Lexington, have been working on many aspects of this material since 2008. The excavation itself took place in the 1960s, with a huge amount of volunteer work to wash and sort the artifacts in the years immediately following. The exhibit will be the first public presentation of research that has been going on (with some long pauses) for more than 45 years!

Christa M. Beranek

Research Archaeologist

Fiske Center for Archaeological Research

University of Massachusetts Boston

Remembering the Dig

Paul O'Shaughnessy, the current President of the Historical Society, was a participant in the original dig on the Hancock-Clarke grounds. Below are his recollections of the excavation.

I must have been 9 or 10 years old when my mom asked me if I'd like to be part of a summer archaeological dig right here in Lexington.

She would drop me off at the site in the morning. I remember shovels of dirt dumped into my screen table, which I would sift, turning up enormous numbers of coal clinkers.

However, every once in a while, something extraordinary would appear, and we'd run over to the man in charge and show him our find. My first discovery was a giant key. It looked like something from the movies.

A few days later, up came a spoon. The handle was bent, and as I watched, the man tried to staighten it. To my horror, broke it in half. "Oh, well," he said, "I guess we'll need to fix that one." So, if you see one with a soldered mend in the handle, that's my spoon!

Paul O'Shaughnessy

A 200+ Year Old Jigsaw Puzzle

Here we have a post from Yvette Kirby, one of a team of intrepid volunteers working to clean and piece together artifacts for the exhibit. Like most everything the Historical Society undertakes, this exhibit would quite literally not be possible without the dedicated support of our volunteers.

For the past several weeks, a team of volunteers has been painstakingly cleaning, and, where possible, mending the artifacts inventoried by the UMass archaeology team. We have removed accumulated dirt, excess glue from previous mending efforts, and the identifying numbers applied (in red nail polish!) during the 1965 dig, using Q-tips, cotton balls, acetone, and much patience. Diane O’Shaughnessy scrubbed an interesting array of buttons, beads, cuff links, eyeglass pieces, combs, and other samples of personal adornment items. The acetone unfortunately gives off strong fumes, so from time to time we’ve had to hang out the window of Munroe Tavern to inhale fresh air.

Mending items has been a challenge, even for those who enjoy jigsaw puzzles. The first question is whether any pieces seem to fit together. Then the challenge is to find the exact spot where two pieces are married, apply ceramic adhesive and hold it until it sets (without gluing your fingers to the artifact). Then the pieces are left to dry overnight, propped up in a box of sand. We have fragments of at least three tin-glazed earthenware plates, all decorated in a lovely blue and white Delft floral pattern. But which pieces go with which? After much study and discussion, we isolated two sets of fragments in the shape of plates, but they proved impossible to repair. The earthenware base is too thick for the ceramic adhesive to hold, and the brittle tin glaze is too flaky to work with.

Dallas Gale had more luck with a glazed redware dish with white slip decoration. She painstakingly fit multiple fragments together, then glued and reglued them with ceramic adhesive, holding them for long periods of time, then taping them while they dried in a bed of sand. Lois Wells struggled with an Iberian unglazed redware storage jar. It was so porous that the adhesive simply soaked into the fragments. But after many tries, and long periods of holding the pieces together, there are now enough fragments put together to give a good sense of the jar’s shape.

Elaine Doran succeeded in piecing together a lovely white-glazed stoneware bowl and a Rhenish salt glazed chamber pot. She also tackled a glass wine bottle. This was hard to piece together because there wasn’t much surface to hold onto, but with tape holding it together while drying, it now looks like what it is. I worked on a Chinese export porcelain tea bowl and saucers with mixed success. The porcelain is beautiful and very delicate, and I had to remend pieces several times.

The thrill of handling these 200-year old objects far outweighed the frustrations of mending. It was fun to think about how these objects may have been used by the Rev. Hancock’s family, and to try to picture Mrs. Hancock serving tea or the Reverend himself buckling his shoes.

Welcome!

The genesis of the Society’s fall 2010 exhibit of artifacts from the Hancock-Clarke House dig has an interesting twist to it. A couple of years ago Elaine Doran, the Society’s Collections Manager, and I realized that we did not know the whereabouts of the many boxes of artifacts collected during the 1960s dig at the Hancock-Clarke House. This was obviously a big problem! Thanks to some excellent detective work by Elaine, they were located in the cellar of the Town’s visitors center where they had been stored for decades. We were delighted to recover them.

The next step was to have the Fiske Center for Archaeology at U Mass Boston inventory the artifacts and put them in better boxes. Christa Beranek was the leader of this effort for U Mass. We admire Christa’s professional approach, and enjoyed working with her and two of her master’s degree students who ended up doing their theses on the collection.

The date range for the artifacts is 1690-1740 and for the most part pre-date the existing house which was built in 1737. This means that the artifacts were used by the Reverend John Hancock, Lexington’s minister for 50 years and the grandfather of the famous Patriot. The artifacts include every day items like chamber pots and milk pans, items used for entertaining such as wine bottles and fancy dishes, and decorative items for personal adornment like buttons and jewelry.

On October 16, we will open an exhibit of these artifacts at Buckman Tavern. We would like to locate people who were involved in the 1960s dig to share their memories with us on this blog, and hope that they will also come to see the exhibit.

Elaine Doran is working with Christa on the exhibit and currently has a team of volunteers doing mending of the artifacts that will be on display.

Hancock-Clarke House Artifacts Exhibit

Stay tuned for posts from Historical Archaeologist Christa Beranek, Historian Richard Kollen, Executive Director Susan Bennett, and much more!