Figure 15. — Yellow lead-glazed earthenware creampan of local Tide- 

 water manufacture, probably dating from the second quarter of the 18th 

 century. Found in Williamsburg. Rim diameter 34.29 centimeters. 



sections through three saggers of different sizes, one 

 for holding quart tankards (fig. 12), another for pint 

 mugs, and a third which might have served for the 

 bowls, the last being 5% inches in height and having 

 an interior base diameter of approximately 8 inches, 

 with walls % inch thick and side apertures 5% inches 

 apart. 79 These apertures are pear shaped and are 

 common to all the Yorktown saggers, as they are 

 also to the examples excavated at Bankside in Lon- 

 don. 80 The tankard saggers have three such holes 

 plus a vertical slit which extends from the top to the 

 bottom to house the handles, but it is not known 

 whether the wide and shallow example described 

 above would have possessed this feature. If this ex- 

 ample was intended only for bowls, a slot would not 



79 U.S. National Park Service collection at Jamestown: 

 Yorktown — the first from the Swan Tavern Site and the 

 others from Project 203, F.S. 8, unstratified material recovered 

 during sewer digging on Main Street, 1956-1957. 



"° Oswald, op. cit. (footnote 66), fig. IX. 



have been needed and an extra aperture probably 

 would have been substituted: but were it also used for 

 pipkins, a handle opening would have been essential. 

 The purpose of the pear-shaped apertures was to en- 

 able the salt fumes to percolate freely around the ves- 

 sels being fired. For the same reason sagger lids 

 sometimes were jacked up on small pads of clay, or 

 the sagger rim scooped out here and there to let the 

 fumes enter from the top. A careful examination of 

 some of the Yorktown vessels shows that those closest 

 to the salting holes received excessive fuming through 

 the sagger apertures, the outlines of which were trans- 

 ferred to the pots in patches or stripes of heavy greenish 

 mottling. 



Other kiln furniture found in Yorktown includes 

 fragments of sagger lids having an average thickness 

 of % of an inch and various lumps of clay which served 

 as kiln pads and props. 1 ' Without knowing the type 



1,1 U.S. National Park Service collection at Jamestown : 

 Yorktown, S.T. 1933. 



PAPER 54: THE POOR POTTER OF YORKTOWN 



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