#histarch

PETER JAMES believes ancient Egyptians formed the huge tombs by piling up rubble and small rocks on the inside and attaching the large bricks on the outside later rather than using giant blocks carried up ramps.

Whatever the source is, it's good to be reminded of the larger realities in construction and how we think about them archaeologically. Whether it's ancient Egypt or Gilded Age Boston, the built environment is really a series of processes and not static at all. Archaeology can demonstrate this, and it's a real strength because the labor and people behind structures are all too often written out of history. 

In the case of my bricks in 17th c. Long Island, I think they can tell us more about who made them, and how they were burned, and maybe what the experience of labor and maintenance was like at a northern Dutch plantation, both for slaves and hired workmen. Because at this site we don't quite know, and we never thought to ask the building materials themselves.

Bricks were literally the foundation of colonial presence in the northeastern US, and yet the raw stuff of those cities is highly underappreciated because archaeological traces of production are easy to miss.

So at the least, my bricks get us thinking about all that, asking more questions about silenced people and looking a little closer at the traces that remain. I think that's a win for material that had been weighed and boxed eight years before I cracked it open.   

A key feature of telling the material history of these bricks is these bits inside them that react and appear differently in an overall mixture. A few things are going on here: tempered, rounded black clay nodules with distinct tempering; offgassing calcareous clay and oxides forming micropores, colored swirls and dots; flaky, dry fired clay grog; a red glassy crust; large chunks of mineral sands to compare with mortars, pan-tiles and soil cores.  

It's quite a beautiful thing, to have the raw planetary chemistry of the earth and heat so vividly and irrefutably captured in a human artifact.