Archaeology Magazine - May/June 1986 - 65

mately 20,000men and women arrived in
New England. Tb protect Puritan control
of the new Bay colony settlements, freemanship was limited to adult male members of Bay churches. In Charlestown,
as in other Bay towns, the result was
the emergence of an oligarchy of literate, devout Puritans who determined the
ideological, social and economic characteristics of the town's institutions.
But by the late seventeenth century
one out of every ten adult males in
Boston described himself as a "merchant," and merchants were the prime
movers of economic and social change
in the Massachusetts Bay colony. The
lifestyles of prominent merchants and
sea captains were effectively, if not intentionally, in conflict with Puritanism.
One objective of this group, the free exchange of people and goods between the
Old and New World, ran counter to the
isolation needed for uncontested political authority of the Puritan magistracy.
Many first -generation merchants who
settled in New England attempted to reproduce the gentrified lifestyle of Old
England. Their broad exposure to cosmopolitan English society- the society the
Puritans had renounced- was expressed
by a worldly taste in dress, the decorative arts, architecture, and landscaping.
The Puritan church and government
struck out against ostentatious displays
through the passage of sumptuary laws,
but these ultimately proved ineffective
against the influence of the merchants.
Archaeological evidence from the
house cellar of the Charlestown merchant and ship master James Garrett
provides important information about
the daily life and business activities of
the earliest Massachusetts Bay colony
traders. James Garrett was one of several merchants and sea captains from
the hamlet of Wapping, in Stepney,
England, who settled in Charlestown
during the Great Migration. He and his
wife Deborah were made church members in 1638 and later that year occupied a house and houselot near Charlestown's Wapping Dock, where James
Garrett participated in maritime commerce as master of the ships Hopewell
and Trade's Increase . Garrett moved
back to Wapping, England in 1649 after
the conclusion of the English Civil War,
and sold his Charlestown property in
1656. His involvement in commerce continued until his death at sea in 1657.
The cellar of Garrett's house, located
at the foot of the Charlestown battery
or fort, proved to be the best-preserved
example of "earth-fast" impermanent
cellar construction yet discovered in New
England. It consisted of a wooden frame
structure with plank walls and floor sunk
two meters beneath the ground surface.
Apparently constructed in 1638, within
20 years it had been partially dismantled
and filled with soil containing an estimated 20,000 artifacts- certainly the

richest archaeological assemblage from
any seventeenth-century house site in
New England.
The Garrett household possessed a
wide variety of ceramics, the colorful
tin-glazed wares from Portugal, Italy,
Holland and England that provide further evidence for Puritan appreciation
of imported ceramics that drew their design inspiration from the Roman Catholic courts of Italy, supposedly deplored
by the Puritans.
These wares also testified to the
far-reaching trade networks of Massachusetts Bay merchants and foreign
merchants attracted to New England
markets during the early seventeenth
century. As early as the 1630s Massachusetts Bay shipping was engaged in
the West Indies trade and the fish and
lumber trade with England. When civil
war in England cut off immigration to
and trade with America in 1641, Massachusetts Bay merchants intensified their
trade in fish, lumber and corn with the
West Indies, exchanging these for sugar,
molasses and fruit which were marketed
on the Continent in exchange for manufactured goods including ceramics. Another trade complex involved sending
fish and barrel staves to Spain and Portugal to be exchanged for wine, oil and
possibly ceramics, which were traded for
goods in the West Indies before the return trip to New England.
The trading activities of New England
merchants like James Garrett and the
popularity of New England ports with
the French and Dutch troubled the English. In mid-seventeenth century Parliament passed laws to regulate the commerce of the American colonies in the
interest of England and a series of Navigation Acts to wrest control of the
carrying trade from the Dutch by restricting colonial trade to English ships.
All of these were to become sources of
friction between Britain and the colonies.
At this time Charlestown craftsmen
were aggressively competing with the
English for colonial markets in certain
types of manufactured goods. Perhaps
our earliest evidence of Charlestown
craftsmanship is from James Garrett's
cellar. Most of the ceramic utility wares
found there appear to be local productsundecorated, red-glazed earthenware
pots, pans, jugs, and cups probably
made at the workshop of Philip and
Edward Drinker, two of the earliest potters documented in North America, who
settled in Charlestown in 1635.
Late in the seventeenth century New
England seaports such as Charlestown
grew at the expense of rural communities. In addition to its commercial importance Charlestown also served as an
entrepôt for processing import and
export commodities - distilling rum,
grinding chocolate, refining sugar and
tanning leather. An increasing urban
population demanded the services of

a wide variety of craftsmen, builders
and service personnel. In the earty
eighteenth century Charlestown's public places were graced with public build'
ings including a meeting house and
court house. The original street system
designed by Massachusetts Bay Cqjmpany engineer Thomas Graves was -retained, however- and has contributed
to traffic congestion down to the present day.
As a result of changing consumer behavior during this period living conditions improved for the households of.
both merchants and craftsmen, which
showed a growing tendency to purchase
manufactured goods, especially clothing
and household furnishings. This emergence of the first world-scale consumer
society helped fuel the British Industrial Revolution, which initially focused
on the mass production of consumer
goods.
The lifestyle of Charlestown sea captain Robert Ball, captain of the brig
Poultèny and master of the Post Boy ill
1745, illustrates one extreme of this increased consumption of English manufactured goods. When Captain Ball
died on the Guinea coast in 1753, probably on a slaving expedition, he left an
estate valued at £1947. A probate inventory of his possessions provides important information to supplement the
results of the archaeological investigation of his housesite.
In 1732 Captain Ball purchased a spacious estate on Wapping Street, overlooking the waterfront, for his growing
family which eventually included seven
children. Construction debris suggests
that he converted the seventeenth-century house into a more fashionable
Georgian-style mansion. Behind it were
outbuildings including a milkhouse with
a paved floor, separated from the formally planned orchard and garden by a
gravel walkway. A thick midden deposit
around the house revealed household artifacts and food remains, and large quantities of refuse had been strewn about
the rear of the house in an unsanitary
fashion. Any other means of disposal
was apparently precluded by the sheer
volume of the trash, which was also impressive in quality. Fine oriental porcelain and fashionable English earthenwares and stonewares were found, along
with prodigious numbers of English
wine bottles and glasses which added
meaning to a small glass locket depicting a cherub atop a cask proclaiming
the toast, "To the Gin." Analysis of
bones revealed a preference for diversity
and delicacy of meat- veal, lamb and
small birds, whose bones were twice as
numerous as those of fish, surprisingly
in view of the site's shorefront location.
In sharp contrast to the archaeological,
evidence from Captain Ball's property
was that from the houselot of a Charlescontinued on page 76
1986 65
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Archaeology Magazine - May/June 1986

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