This isn’t the post I’d originally intended to write this week, but who of us right now is doing what we thought we’d be doing even at the start of this week, let alone a few weeks ago? As the week has progressed, it has become increasingly difficult to see the relevance of that original idea in the current time and place. So, inspired by the work of a colleague (whose excellent blog post you can see here), I started thinking more about isolation in 19th century Aotearoa New Zealand. What follows is a very once-over-lightly and rambling consideration about the different types of isolation experienced by the 19th century settlers of Canterbury, thinking about the sites of isolation I have worked on or know about. I’ve not discussed the types of isolation that Māori experienced during the century (although some may well have been the same as the European settlers, but there would also have been many types of isolation caused by colonialism), as I am in no position to do justice to this (but see this).
Truly splendid isolation. The centre of W. T. L. Travers’s station, on Lake Guyon, in what is now the St James Conservation Area, and where W. L. Newcombe lived in the 1860s (NENZC 29/11/1866: 3). It looks isolated, but there was actually someone living about an hour and half’s walk away (NENZC 29/11/1866: 3). Image: Alexander Turnbull Library, PA1-q-247-02.
Isolation actually forms a fairly prominent theme in Aotearoa New Zealand’s historiography, thanks largely to the work of Miles Fairburn (1989). I’ll confess that I’ve not read all of Fairburn, but I think I’ve read enough, and enough about his work, to be able to summarise his arguments reasonably accurately (bearing in mind that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing). I should say, too, that I’m going to focus on what Fairburn had to say about isolation in 19th century Aotearoa New Zealand, not his overall thesis. Fairburn (1989: 173) calculated that, prior to 1991, some 36-47% of the population did not have any physically close neighbours (I would contend that the methods used to generate this figure were not quite as robust as might be desirable – to be fair, it is not easy data to generate). He argued that this physical isolation was compounded by being a significant distance from ‘home’ in a strange country, without family and friends. He went on to argue that this isolation, in conjunction with relatively high levels of land ownership and relatively high levels of what he called transience (basically that people didn’t live in any one place for particularly long), combined to create an atomised society. This society was characterised by weak social bonds and high levels of drunkenness and violence (Belich 1991: 673). Subsequent work has found a more nuanced picture, and his work has been critiqued for not recognising that important social bonds formed in the face of this physical isolation (Ballantyne 2011: 61-62, Belich 1991: 674).
But it remains true that many of Aotearoa New Zealand’s 19th century settlers had left their homes to move to the other end of the world, and many came knowing that they were unlikely to see their family and friends again – I still cannot imagine the leap of faith that requires. Of course, in some cases, family and friends came too: the family of Ernest Oppenheim, who built one of the houses I’m researching, arrived in Christchurch gradually over a ten year period, most of them as adults (DLS 1865, 1872. And while others arrived on their own, they might have been attached to a broader community through religion or country of origin (Fraser 1997). While it was a lengthy boat journey back home, it was by no means impossible: Jessie’s work has found evidence of business owners travelling back to England for business purposes and I have come across families that travelled back simply for a visit. To be fair, this was often a visit of several years and probably the preserve of the wealthy. While it’s not the same, letters appear to have flown back and forth across the oceans, between New Zealand and family members who had not emigrated (Porter and Macdonald 1996: 2). Similarly, this was the age of the telegram, and English newspapers in particular were readily available in New Zealand’s cities, albeit somewhat out of date. All of these would have provided valuable and important connections between those who emigrated and those who did not.
Newspaper from home, wherever that might have been, provided a critical link to the world that many of Aotearoa New Zealand’s 19th century settlers had left behind. New Zealand newspapers printed stories from English and other newspapers, mechanics’ institutes stocked various papers for overseas (Schrader 2016: 133) and subscriptions to these papers were available – our addiction to the news is nothing new! Image: Lyttelton Times 17/4/1858: 5.
For some settlers, there was also a very real isolation from others, even in this country. Take Mrs McRae, for example, who lived on Stronechrubie station*, way up in the headwaters of the Rangitata River, from about 1878-1892 and apparently went some 10 years without seeing another woman (Acland 1975: 301-302, 304; Brown 1940: 218). Pastoral stations in general lent themselves to isolated communities at least, if not always isolated individuals. The early boundary keepers of Canterbury (who were, as best my research has identified, fairly few and far between), however, would have been much more isolated, as would the occasional shepherds who lived out on the far reaches of the shepherd. These men would have lived on their own year-round, with just occasional visits from other station workers (I honestly don’t know whether wives might have lived with them).
The remains of an 1850s shepherd’s hut on what was then Omarama station (Watson 2010: 4).
While this isolation must have been pretty hard to deal with for some, there were others who actively sought it out. Take for example, Wyndham Barker, who I’ve written about before over here (and here), established an ice rink on the north bank of the Rangitata River in the 1930s, in the lee of Mt Harper. He and his wife, Brenda, lived here year-round – even today, it’s an hour (including a jet boat ride) from the nearest town (Geraldine). And that’s the quickest way to get there. While things would have been busy there in the winter, the Barkers would have lived in splendid isolation in the summer – and the spectacular scenery would have made it quite, quite splendid.
I can think of much worse places to be isolated. But I am a natural introvert and this is pretty much my tūrangawaewae. The ice rink is in the foreground, and Wyndham and Brenda’s house is in the poplars in the middle distance.
For those living in the cities, there was much less obvious isolation, although one of the criticisms levelled at city dwelling is the isolation that can be experienced in spite of being surrounded by so many people. It is difficult to explore this type of isolation archaeologically, however. Perhaps one of the more obvious ways that people would have experienced isolation in Christchurch is through physical and forcible isolation, in either gaol or the asylum. As with the other sites of isolation discussed here, these were sites of both physical and social isolation, but the social isolation in these cases was much more deliberate. The residents of these institutions were being isolated from the rest of society for what was believed to be the benefit of both society and the individual who was being isolated. Reality, of course, may have been very different for all concerned.
One of the buildings that made up the Sunnyside Lunatic Asylum. Image: Te Papa, C.011626.
What I kept thinking about, though, as I wrote this post was that while all these people were isolated, and some in very remote locations, they all remained connected to the world in different ways. At the Sunnyside Lunatic Asylum, in the early years at least, the public were encouraged to attend a range of events at the asylum, including dances, plays, church services and cricket matches (Seager 1987). Station diaries reveal a considerable amount of to-ing and fro-ing between different stations, whether for business or pleasure – there was the seasonal round of the shearing gangs, station employees would often go and carry out work on adjoining properties, and then there were social events, too, in the form of balls and other parties (Barker 1883: 90-91, 98). And I’ve already mentioned the various ways 19th century settlers remained connected to the world they’d left behind. From this I drew two conclusions. One: while life in 19th century New Zealand might seem isolated at first glance, once you start to look into it, it wasn’t. You might not have been able to video chat with your friends from all around the globe over lunch, but expectations were different then. And this connects to my second moral: our connections to people matter. This is stating the obvious, particularly in the current circumstances. But it’s worth remembering here and now that these connections have always mattered, and that our forebears coped with this isolation and that we will too. Humans are resilient and social beings and we will always find ways to connect with others in our isolation.
Sometimes it might take crazy video chats to get you through – and this was only Day 1…
Katharine Watson
*A station (also known as a run) was a large landholding, typically of tens of thousands of acres.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say.
Is it, though? Is it really?
I’ve always wondered about that phrase. The thought of someone imitating me, personally, is far creepier than it is flattering, the kind of behaviour that thrillers twist to disturbing ends. If not creepy, there’s an element of mockery that lingers, particularly in imitation of mannerisms or speech, no doubt a hang up from siblings and playground nemeses gleefully repeating every word you say, never intending to flatter, always to ridicule and annoy. Professionally, in a world of intellectual property and copyright law, imitation is a fraught and complicated issue. Emulation, of business model, professional comportment, employment environments, fine, yes? Imitation, of design, of ideas, of brand? Well, that’s usually called something else, and it’s not flattery.
Yet, imitation remains a part of our material world, particularly within the framework of expensive vs. cheap, or authentic vs. fake. From designer knock-offs sold on the street for a fraction of the price, to mass-produced clothing that adapts and ‘imitates’ the trends of the catwalk, to interior design fads. It’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot lately, because it’s not a new thing and there are more than a few examples in the Christchurch assemblage that illustrate how the imitation of design – particularly in ceramics – is rooted as much in the social and economic meaning of objects, as it is in the aesthetic.
I had originally intended to have a paragraph here giving a brief overview of intellectual property rights in the UK in the nineteenth century, but it turns out that “brief” and “intellectual property law” are not things that go together. So, here are some links to the British Library and National Archives pages on design, trademarks and patents if you’d like to muddle your own way through it. Basically, what you need to know is that prior to 1839, very few protections, if any, existed for design or trademark and, after 1839, those protections that did exist did not necessarily prevent people from ‘adapting’ any designs they wanted (Carter-Silk and Lewiston 2012: 28; Drakard and Holdway 2002: 45). British potters, in particular, were apparently notorious for copying and reproducing designs and I’m not super clear on how the legislation affected this practice in the long run. I’m also not really trying to unravel that, as I’m sure it’s an extremely tangled web of legislation and trade protections and my brain can only take so much. What I’ve been thinking about of late is more to do with the why of imitation in nineteenth century ceramics, from the perspective of both the manufacturer and the consumer.
While I was away, I found a little bit of time to go and visit Stoke-on-Trent, in order to geek out about ceramics. Apparently now a place that no-one in England would ever conceive of going to unless they absolutely had to, Stoke-on-Trent was nevertheless the heart of the Staffordshire pottery industry of the nineteenth century and, if you are a pottery nerd (or even if you are not), it remains the place to go to experience both the industrial manufacturing processes of Victorian pottery production and the end results of that industry. While at Spode/Copeland, we had a short tour from one of the people there of their “Blue Room”, in which we talked about perhaps one of the most famous, and most taken for granted, examples of imitation (perhaps appropriation would be a better word) in nineteenth century material culture: that is, the English imitation of Chinese ceramic designs, fabric and forms.
Stoke-on-Trent is apparently a place that no-one else ever visits. Ever. From the friend who said “I’ve never heard of anyone wanting to visit Stoke”, to the people in London who said “Why on earth are you going to Stoke?” to the hotel receptionist who assumed we were there for work, because why else would anyone go to Stoke-on-Trent, it became very clear that, to the English, it’s like saying you travelled across the world specifically to visit Ashburton (sorry Ashburton, it was you or Gore and I feel like I’ve made enough jokes about Gore that I feel bad about it). Images: J. Garland and T. Wadsworth.
Because of the demand for Chinese porcelain, British potters – such as Spode – would reproduce patterns in their entirety, as well as producing patterns that claimed ‘inspiration’ from Chinese designs. Several of these are held by the Spode/Copeland museum in Stoke-on-Trent, showing both the original Chinese porcelain plate (left) and the British reproduction (right). Image: J. Garland.
Much has been written about the influence of Chinese art and culture on the development of the British ceramic industry (and tea drinking culture; i.e. Drakard and Holdaway 2002: 45, Coysh and Henrywood 1982). Much of the imitation of Chinese designs and styles was rooted in the association of Chinese porcelain with tea drinking, both in terms of the functionality of porcelain (hard, non-porous, coped well with boiling water) and the status of the beautiful blue and white Chinese styles that were, until the late eighteenth century, some of the finest available in Britain and Europe (Coysh and Henrywood 1982). To manufacture ‘Chinoiserie’, as it came to be called, was to buy into the social meaning of Chinese porcelain as much as the economic; to transfer the prestige – technical and social – of imported Chinese porcelains to the local industry. To purchase it was to implicitly acknowledge the fashionability of Chinese ceramics, by choosing to own – and display – a (usually) cheaper version. The Willow pattern is arguably the best example of this, although its ubiquity stands in contrast to the porcelains it imitates.
Willow pattern platter from a Christchurch site, alongside a Whampoa patterned plate, another example of Chinoiserie ceramic decoration.
The Christchurch assemblage, as most nineteenth century British colonial assemblages do, has copious quantities of ‘Chinoiserie’, or Chinese ‘inspired’ designs, from the Willow pattern (still sold today!) to slightly more uncommon patterns, some of which reference trading posts or places of significance to the English in China. However, it also has a few other examples of ceramic imitations, several of which are layered and often serve to complicate the identification and dating of artefacts and assemblages.
Colourful jug from Christchurch variously identified as a Mason ‘Imari’ jug, imitation Mason jug and Gaudy Welsh jug. This was found in an 1850s-1860s context in Christchurch’s CBD, on a mixed commercial and domestic site. Image: J. Garland.
This beautiful (perhaps, depending on your tastes…) jug was found on a site on Colombo Street a few years ago. It references what are known as Mason ‘Imari’ jugs, which in turn imitate a style of Japanese export porcelain known as ‘Imari’ by Europeans (Godden 1992: 216-218; Kowalsky and Kowalsky 1999: 269, Hildyard 2005: 123). When I first came across this jug, I found the Mason (G. M. and C. J. Mason, c. 1813-1840) examples when I was researching, but the lack of “Mason” in the impressed stamp on the base of the Christchurch jug suggested that it may have been an imitation (Trendafilov et al. 2017: 222; Paull 2018). Since then, however, I’ve come across another style, amusingly named “Gaudy Welsh”, that was made between 1820 and 1860 in several Welsh potteries (Lewis 2011). Identical examples of the jug found in Christchurch have also been identified by collectors and others as Gaudy Welsh jugs. I’m still not clear on which one it is (if anyone knows, do get in touch!), but I think there’s a case to be made that either option still references the initial Mason jugs, and all of the British examples are themselves imitations of a Japanese style. The precise nature of that imitation – inspiration or copying – is less clear, but the links back to Japanese export porcelain remains. It’s certainly clear that this was a design and a style that was shared among different potters during the early-mid nineteenth century and one that consumers may have recognised as either Mason or Japanese inspired.
Batavian ware dish with engraved decoration. Interestingly, both this dish and the gaudy jug were found in the same assemblage, suggesting they were owned by the same person. Image: J. Garland.
Another unusual artefact was found in the same assemblage. This, a brown glazed porcelain dish through which a bird and foliage design had been engraved, resembles a style of pottery popular over a century before Christchurch was settled by Europeans. Known as Batavian ware, after the port through which the original porcelain was shipped (Batavia/Jakarta), this ware consisted of Chinese export porcelain that had been covered with a brown glaze, sometimes with windows to the original porcelain or further decorated by European engravers, with bird and foliage designs (Li 2012; Nilsson 1998-2019; MacPherson 2020; Kerr 2011). Given the dates of popularity for this ware – the 1720s to 1730s – it was a deeply confusing artefact to find in a post-1850s Christchurch context and possible explanations for its presence ranged from an heirloom brought over by a settler to a nineteenth century imitation. The latter was supported by the relatively crude nature of the engraving and what appeared to be a softer porcelain paste for the body of the dish, rather than the harder Chinese porcelain expected for an original.
Various sources suggest different forms of revival or imitation occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: one indicates a revival in the early 1800s in the Netherlands, made primarily for export to South East Asia (Nilsson 1998-2019), while others suggest that the Meissen and Leeds factories made wares in imitation of the earlier Chinese Batavian pottery during the late 1700s and early 1800s (Campbell 2006: 79). That said, it’s all still a bit vague and even the early nineteenth century date is a bit early for Christchurch (an imitation AND an heirloom, perhaps?), but it does lend some credence to the idea of it being an imitation. If that’s the case, the nature of the imitation is multi-faceted, as something that references both Chinese porcelain and European trade, as well as European decorative arts through the wheel engraving. The idea of imitation as ‘revival’ also adds an element of time depth to the reproduction or adaptation of designs that is less evident in the imitation of contemporary designs. It’s something we’re familiar with today, particularly in fashion, for better or worse: I hear the 90s are back at the moment, for example, which is very much something I consider to be for worse.
An imitation of the Blue Fluted Plain or Pattern No. 1, found in Christchurch. The motif refrences stylised Chrysanthemum and cinquefoil flowers and is another example of Chinese-inspired design. The decoration on the Christchurch vessels is cruder, particularly the definition of the cinquefoil flowers, and heavier in colour than many of the examples of Blue Fluted Plain that exist elsewhere, both modern and antique. An email conversation with someone at the Royal Copenhagen factory suggests that the Christchurch examples are not originals, but may be German or English imitations (pers. comm. Nottelmann, September 2019). Image: J. Garland.
Last, but not least, more recently, I discovered a design on several porcelain vessels in Christchurch – mostly chambersticks and tea wares – that had its own story of appropriation. These vessels, found on the site of a nineteenth century shop, as well as the backyard of an early Christchurch rabbi, Isaac Zachariah, and successful Christchurch solicitor Henry Wynn Williams, were decorated with a blue floral line design with more than a passing resemblance to the Blue Fluted Plain pattern (or Pattern No. 1) produced by the Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Factory from at least 1775 to the present day (Royal Copenhagen 2019). The pattern was extremely popular throughout the nineteenth century and was copied by a variety of other European potters, as well as their British counterparts. The latter included Furnival who produced it as the “Denmark” pattern and Allerton, who produced a version under the name “Stockholm”, which demonstrates that people could be as bad at geography in the nineteenth century as they are now. Naturally, the Blue Fluted Plain was itself inspired by Chinese designs, because of course it was. It was an exceptionally popular pattern and style and the factory was associated with the royal family and Danish nobility, for whom many of their products were made.
The naming of the English versions of the Blue No 1 pattern shows an awareness of its Danish origins, even of its origins as Royal Danish Porcelain (well, the Furnival one does – the Allerton one is, admittedly, a bit confused). The acknowledgement of the European origins of the pattern and the replication of the design is not just an acknowledgement of its popularity but – particularly for the consumer – is also an acknowledgement of the social status of the design, an attempt to gain that same meaning for a fraction of the price. We know this – many of us do this, when we buy cheaper versions of designer goods, when we respond to a complement with “oh, it’s just a fake”, when we equate authenticity and originality with realness and therefore, imitation with pretense. It’s not an association I can prove from only a couple of samples, but it is interesting to note that the examples found on domestic sites in Christchurch are associated with people of a moderate-high community status – a rabbi and a well-respected and successful solicitor.
Writing this post raised a few points for me, in terms of design and the different forms of imitation and the nature of art and material culture. One, I had a lot more to say about this than I thought I would (if you’ve made it this far through the post, well done!). Two, the stories that can be told by artefacts can have much greater depth and breadth to them than even I think possible sometimes. So many of the artefacts found in Christchurch to date are British-made, but their stories are in fact part of a much greater art and design tradition that spans centuries and continents and builds again and again on what came before it. Even though the city was settled by Europeans in 1850, to limit our perspective just to the latter half of the nineteenth century would be to ignore so many of the factors that contributed to its development: both the people who arrived to settle there after 1850, and those who had already been there for centuries have stories – and material culture – that extend back through time and across the world. And three, copyright and intellectual property law is a surprisingly interesting and unsurprisingly complicated thing that, for the most part, appears to have had little impact on the potters of the nineteenth century, no matter where they were in the world.
Jessie
References Carter-Silk, A. and Lewiston, M., 2012. The Development of Design Law Past and Future: From History to Policy. Intellectual Property Office, Newport.
Coysh, A. W. and Henrywood, R. K., 1982. The Dictionary of Blue and White Printed Pottery 1780‐1880, Volume I. Antique Collectors’ Club, Suffolk.
Drakard, D. and Holdway, P., 2002. Spode Transfer Printed Ware: 1784-1833. Antique Collector’s Club.
Godden, G., 1992. An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of British Pottery and Porcelain. Magna Books, Leicester.
Hildyard, R., 2005. English Pottery 1620-1840. V & A Publications, London.
Kowalsky, A. A. and Kowalsky, D. E., 1999. Encyclopedia of Marks on American, English and EuropeanEarthenware, Ironstone, and Stoneware 1780-1980. Makers, Marks and Patterns in Blue and White,Historic Blue, Flow Blue, Mulberry, Romantic Transferware, Tea Leaf, and White Ironstone. A Schiffer Book for Collectors, Atglen, U.S.A.
Li, B., 2012. ‘Batavian’ Style Chinese Export Porcelain: Origins, Recent Finds and Historic Significance. In Buslig, S. A., Chien, N. D. and Li, B. 2012. The Ca Mau Shipwreck Porcelain [1723-1735]. The Hungarian Southeast East Asian Research Institute.
Paull, J., 2018. Janice Paull Antiques and Design, International Specialist in Mason’s and other English Ironstone China, c. 1790-1848: Fakes. [online] Available at http://www.janicepaull.com/fakes/fakes.htm [Accessed 3/5/2018].
Trendafilov, A., Garland, J., Whybrew, C., Mearns, L., Lillo Bernabeu, M., Hennessey, M. and Webb, K., 2018. Christchurch Convention Centre, Vol. 1. Final report on archaeological monitoring under HNZPT authority 2017/280 eq. Unpublished report.
Before answering that question, let’s start with what buildings archaeology is. Basically, it’s using archaeological techniques to document standing structures with a whole range of functions, from tramping huts, to houses, to churches, to flour mills, to shops, to libraries, to hotels and even radiation laboratories, along with any other building type you can think of. Like other forms of archaeology, buildings archaeology uses a variety of techniques, such as drawing, photographing, measuring, recording and sampling. More technological methods can be used too, such as dendrochronology, laser scanning and photogrammetry – although these last two are really just achieving the same end as drawing, measuring and photography. And, because of the period of our past that I deal with (mostly the 19th century), I’d like to throw in historical research as an archaeological technique too, because this provides some of the necessary context for interpreting the building – without this, I could not understand the buildings I’m investigating.
The former Christchurch Public Library, built 1875 to a design by William Armson. Arguably the most beautiful building I recorded post-earthquake. Image: K. Watson.
To me, buildings archaeology is essentially breaking down a building into its individual components, recording all the details of those – form, fabric, dimensions, how it was made or shaped, its location in the building – in order to understand how that building was constructed and how it has changed over time. The building components I’m referring to are things like the foundations, the bricks, the nails, the wallpapers, the skirting boards, the architraves, the window surrounds, the windows themselves, the doors, the roofing material, the floorboards, the nature of the joinery – you get the picture. As well as recording all these individual details, buildings archaeologists also record the form of the building as a whole, through floor plans, elevation drawings, cross-sections and foundation plans.
A house in Avonside Drive, built in c.1897 by T. N. Horsley, local businessman and politician. Image: L. Tremlett.
So why do archaeologists record buildings in this way? What can we learn from doing this? Lots, is the short answer. Buildings, obviously, were not constructed in a vacuum. The construction techniques and building materials used, the external appearance of the building and its internal layout, even its overall form and shape, reflect the economic, social and political context in which it was built – so while it’s essential to understand as much of that context as possible to understand a building, a building can in turn be used to better understand that context (Johnson 2010). Take for example, the recent trend for tiny houses, which, in New Zealand at least, are a response to the current housing crisis, which has seen houses become increasingly expensive. They also, perhaps, represent an increasing desire for a more minimalist way of life, to avoid clutter and owning so many ‘things’. And, for some, they represent a desire for a more environmentally friendly way of life. In some ways, they can be seen as somewhat anti-capitalist. This context, and these broader social movements, help us understand why tiny houses are being built here and now. A detailed analysis of the form and fabric of these houses would shed light on what particular individuals value through what they’ve chosen to build their tiny house from, what they’ve chosen to include in it and, just as importantly, what they’ve chosen to exclude.
There’s a lot that buildings archaeology can tell us about building materials and techniques, which can tell us about the surrounding environment, about trade patterns and about local industry. These things can also be really helpful when trying to work out when a building was built, or when specific changes were made. Examining building techniques and materials can also tell us if a building was built cheaply – or if no expense was spared. Building layout can tell us about social relations, about how space was gendered, about how access to space was restricted to and by different groups, or about how people moved through buildings, and how this relates to broader social patterns. Servants’ stairs are a classic example of the latter, and the hall arch that separated public and private spaces in Victorian era houses is a good example of how access to space was controlled. Like so much archaeology of the recent past, buildings archaeology can shed light on the lives of the marginalised. And it is likely, too, that it can answer questions about homelessness in the past, although it does not at first glance seem well positioned to do so.
A house in Waltham, Christchurch, built with double brick walls, but the internal skin of bricks has been laid stretcher to stretcher, rather than bed to bed, which would have used fewer bricks than building in the standard manner (Hennessey and Watson 2013). Image: Hawkins Construction.
But I am most interested – at the moment – in buildings as material culture, in the premise that houses in particular say something about the people who built, owned and lived in them (and, while my focus is on houses here, the same can be said of any building – basically, buildings say things about people). I regularly trot out the line that we judge the occupants of a house by its appearance in the same way we judge a person based on their appearance – it’s no less true for the frequency with which I say it. Our understanding of houses and our ability to appraise them in this way comes from having an innate sense of what the different features of a house ‘mean’ – or at least, how they’re interpreted by the society in which they were built (and remain standing) – so long as we understand that context. And that’s the kind of understanding that can come simply from living somewhere, from knowing a place well. It’s important to keep in mind that meanings change. They change with time and place. They change as political and social ideas change. And they might change with the people who own or occupy the house, or as the house itself changes. Again, context is everything.
In New Zealand, buildings are protected in much the same way as below ground archaeological sites, in that the Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Act 2014 requires you to have an archaeological authority if you are demolishing a building built prior to 1900 (unlike below ground archaeological sites, buildings are not protected from damage or modification). That archaeological authority will typically require recording of the building prior to and during demolition. And that’s where the sample of houses I’m using for my PhD research comes from. Actually, it’s a bit more specific than that: the 101 buildings in my sample were all demolished between February 2011 and June 2015 under the provisions of what was then the Historic Places Act, as a result of earthquake damage. They were all in Christchurch, and all were built prior to 1900.
This context – yes, that word again – is important for a number of reasons, both for this blog and my research. The rapidly increasing word count of this post means I’m only going to deal with the former here (although there is some overlap) – the latter will no doubt come up in due course. In the first instance, the earthquake context means that there will be photographs of buildings that collapsed to some extent or were badly damaged in the earthquakes, in ways that meant that certain parts of some buildings could not be accessed, or in ways that meant perfect photographs of façades were not possible (those, to be honest, are made pretty difficult by a number of factors, hence the importance of elevation drawings). The other consequence that I’m acutely conscious of is that it means that most of the photographs were not taken by me, and none of the elevations or floor plan were drawn by me. Instead, these images were created by people who working for me at the time. Some of the photographs, too, were taken in the early days after the earthquakes, when I was contracted to Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga (HNZPT) to take photographs of listed and/or pre-1900 buildings that were being demolished. So that’s why you’ll see other people, or HNZPT, credited with a number of the images that appear. It’s also why you’ll see other people credited for the interpretation of the building, whether here or on our social media channels.
A partly collapsed house that I recorded following the earthquakes. Image: Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.
There you have it! A very brief introduction to the whys and wherefores of buildings archaeology. Like any form of archaeology, it’s another way of learning more about the past, and people in the past, through tangible objects, through detailed recording and, a point somewhat belaboured in this post, through understanding context. Buildings are a different dimension through which to investigate the archaeological record, and enhance our understanding of the lives of those who created that record.
References
Hennessey, Matthew and Katharine Watson, 2013. 6 Short Street, Christchurch: report on archaeological monitoring. Unpublished report for Hawkins Construction.
Johnson, Matthew, 2010. English Houses 1300-1800: Vernacular Architecture, Social Life. London: Routledge Ltd.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about languages. Languages and cultures. Specifically, the languages of archaeology, as a profession: how, around the world, they reflect our different cultural backgrounds and historical contexts and, more personally, how they code the perspective and background of the collector and analyst into the archaeological record. Basically, I’ve been reminded how much of ourselves we put into what we record and just how much that reflects our lives and where we come from.
I’ve been away, in the US, Canada and, now, England, where I’m writing this in a café in Whitechapel, London (across the road from a fish and chip shop amusingly named Jack the Chipper…). Maybe it’s because I’ve been looking through archaeological collections from these places with a view to finding similarities and differences, or maybe it’s just me, but hopping from country to country has been a bit of a study in duelling senses of familiarity and strangeness. Some of the differences were obvious: street after street after street of brown brick and stone row housing in Boston and liquor stores disguised as “wine emporiums”. The cobbled streets and age-weathered building facades of London. The politeness of Canadians. I thought it was a stereotype, if I’m honest, but I have never seen so many people have such polite and friendly exchanges with bus drivers: it puts the rest of us to shame.
The snow and -12 to -20 temperatures were also something of a reminder that I was not where I should be in January. Clockwise from top left: snow in London, Ontario; the row houses of Boston; snow in Toronto; Jack the Chipper in Whitechapel, London, where ‘Ripperology’ is still very much a thing.
At the same time, there’s a commonality of culture between all these places – not necessarily on a grand scale, but in the minutiae of daily life. There is much that is the same, or that can at least be easily, unconsciously translated, but the little points of difference remain, creating a weird sort of cognitive dissonance where I feel at home and then remember where I am. It’s something I’ve felt before, living in Australia, although it can sometimes be less obvious there, I think, for a kiwi. There have been times when I’ve genuinely forgotten that I live in Australia, even when I am actually in Australia (funny story, at Canadian passport control, the passport person said “So, you live in Australia?”, to which I replied very authoritatively, thinking I’d been mistaken for an Australian, “No, New Zealand”, until she said, “but you’ve written Australia on the form in front of me”. I forgot. Again. I do live in Australia.).
As those differences and similarities exist in culture, they also exist in language (unsurprisingly, given how one is entangled with the other). In all the places I’ve been over the last few months, we speak the same language, but, still, the words don’t always mean the same thing (there are too many examples of this to list, but my favourite is the word “tramping” and the many baffled faces it elicits from Australians when I say I’m going tramping for the weekend). People and places, even those with shared cultural histories and language bases, grow together in different ways and, sometimes, even the same language requires a little translation.
This is the classic example, isn’t it, when it comes to English-speaking words for the same object: jandals, flip-flops, thongs, slippers, “toe-post sandals”. Image: J. Garland.
And, as with life, so too with archaeology (you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise, but this is actually a blog about archaeology, I promise). Working with archaeological collections in different countries has been an exercise in translation, of systems and of terminology. Despite sharing a great deal of our disciplinary and methodological foundations, we have each developed archaeological languages, or dialects, of our own. Never has this been more apparent to me than in navigating my way around collections of the same types of material culture from different parts of the world. I already knew that artefact terminology can be inconsistent, having spent a lot of time standardising catalogues created by different people, but I hadn’t quite realised how much that inconsistency, when viewed from a global perspective, reflects the different geographical, cultural and archaeological contexts of place.
Some of it is as simple as frames of reference. The British archaeological context is very different to the New Zealand one and their language of analysis is built upon a very different archaeological tradition. Recent, nineteenth century archaeology is only a tiny part of what is excavated and ‘colonial archaeology’ doesn’t apply in quite the same way, so things are labelled and ordered according to other frames of reference: what I would call colonial, European, or British ceramics in New Zealand are post-Roman or post-Medieval pottery in England. The system of archaeological data recording is structured differently, written for a different archaeological record, a different chronology. Just talking about systems of recording material culture data probably deserves a whole other post, if I can figure out how to make it interesting to more than just the data nerds, as does the more general framework surrounding the repositories and collections of archaeological material around the world and, more specifically, in New Zealand.
Some of it is even more meta than just the archaeological context and references the actual disciplinary tradition of archaeology in different places and the influences (for example, the language of collectors) that have impacted that tradition. This became apparent at the SHA Conference in Boston (which Kat wrote about last time), where I went to a forum on the use of synonyms in artefact collections and the need for a glossary of terms, particularly for researchers from different states and countries. This is a very good idea, as anyone who has come across a term like “glass nappy” in a report and had to very gingerly, and with some trepidation, google it at work, will be well aware.
Not what you expected from “glass nappy”, is it? Another term that might require checking, depending on where you come from, is the delightfully named “twiffler“. More mundanely, even something as ubiquitous as a black beer bottle can have multiple names: I’ve seen it called an English wine bottle, black glass stout or black glass porter, even just ‘dark olive bottle’. Image from here.
It was illuminating to hear people from Australia, England and the US talking about just how varied our archaeological languages are (the discussion on white granite and ironstone alone was INTENSE; so too, surprisingly, was the discussion about coarse earthenware). Among the many interesting points covered was one on the unexpectedly diverse languages used for site recording, including, for example, ‘spit’ and ‘artificial or arbitrary level’. Spit, which is, as far as I’m aware, the term used in New Zealand, is a more British term and our use of it, instead of the American artificial level, shows the influence of British field recording on the development of the discipline in New Zealand. Yet, when it comes to colonial archaeology in New Zealand, we borrow more heavily from American artefact terminology than we do from the ‘post-medieval’ British traditions, because so much of what is considered colonial or historical archaeology developed in North America in the twentieth century.
Another mix of terminology that confused me slightly the first time I encountered it: ‘Lots’. This is part of a Certificate of Title from Christchurch, in which “Lot” references a historic property boundary. But in Canada, it’s used to label archaeological features and contexts: “Lot 22” might instead refer to a cesspit.
On a more personal note, thinking about all of this made me think again of the reflection of my own personal disciplinary history and socio-cultural background in the language I use as an archaeologist and an analyst. I don’t know that I have any specific examples, but I have absolutely no doubt they exist. All of the things I’ve just talked about have a very clear and visible influence on the development of archaeological languages, but so too – especially in artefact terminology and analysis – does the human in the equation, i.e. me. The importance of objectivity in cataloguing, especially in the design of typologies, is undeniable, but it’s also impossible to avoid subjectivity entirely, because, in the end, it’s all done by a person and we are nothing if not a product of the world around us.
All of which is very meta and post-modern and other people have written about it with far more clarity than I’ll ever be able to articulate, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s not a bad idea to be reminded every now and then of the world – in all its diversity and similarity – that influences the way that we, in turn, conceptualise the past. And, as always, to remember that context is everything.
A conference like the recent Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) one in Boston can be pretty overwhelming – it’s attended by 1200 people and there are multiple concurrent sessions. Even perusing the lists of papers and all the abstracts can take some serious time, not to mention actually deciding which papers to go to, and working out whether it’s better to attend one whole session (my preference) or to duck from session to session to catch particular individual papers (which I find a bit exhausting!). And there’s almost constant FOMO, not to mention the complete inability to think straight that comes after a full day of listening to papers. But it’s a fantastic opportunity to be able to hear archaeologists from all around the world talk about an incredible diversity of topics, to meet new people, to hear about different approaches and new theories and learn about different places. Such as Iceland. I learnt a lot about Icelandic archaeology this year – not directly relevant to my own work, but still entirely fascinating. Such as the story of a feud between two villages that lasted something like a thousand years (no, that’s not a typo) and the way this played out in the different ceramics they used, with one village using significantly more ‘modern’ ceramics than the other, in spite of the two being pretty geographically close.
One of great things about SHA is the chance to hear a whole lot of ideas that I wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to. So this year I attended a session on archaeology as social activism, another about the politics and memorials, one about queering archaeology (including possible evidence of cross-dressing from early 20th century Washington D.C.), another (Jessie’s session!) about the archaeology of retail and a rather lovely session all about unusual ceramics found on American archaeological sites that was perfect first thing on a Saturday morning. This included a fascinating paper about Mary Washington (George’s mother…) and how she used ceramics to keep up appearances following the death of her husband, which left her with five children and in somewhat reduced circumstances at Ferry Farm, Virginia. Archaeologists working there have found evidence of homemade glues being used to repair ceramic dishes – once repaired, these dishes would not have been watertight, but could still have been used as display pieces. Rather fantastically, the presenters described Mary as having “a strong tea game”, in an era when hosting guests for tea was an important social ritual.
The replica of Mary Washington’s house built at Ferry Farm. Image: Wikipedia.
Buildings archaeology doesn’t loom large at the SHA conference and there were just a handful of papers that really focused on buildings as archaeological sites, although quite a few others that mentioned buildings along the way, including one about what the presenter called “ghosts in the walls”, another phrase I loved. This was about deposits deliberately hidden around the doors and windows – the “liminal spaces” – of Bacon’s Castle, a c.1665 building in Virginia, perhaps by slaves. These objects included a shoe that had deliberately been cut in half, along with more mundane bottles and fragments of glass.
Bacon’s Castle, the oldest surviving brick building in North America, built by Arthur Allen. Image: Wikipedia.
Two papers were much more explicitly about buildings archaeology (there was a third, but it was on at the same time as one of the other two). Sarah Breiter looked at the building materials used in houses in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk in the 14th and 15th centuries while Chris King looked at the similarities and differences between merchants’ houses in Norwich and New England in the 17th century. Sarah Breiter’s paper considered the “entanglements” of the building materials used, and how these building materials reflected what else was going on in that particular time and place – such as the dissolution of the monasteries, or how oak forests were being managed, or how certain people might have controlled access to a particular resource. The basic premise of this paper was that you cannot understand a building properly unless you understand what it was built from and, more importantly, why, because the availability of building materials was governed by the social, environmental, political and economic context in which the building was built.
Chris King’s paper examined the use of merchant’s houses in 16th and 17th century Norwich as civic spaces, explaining how merchants used and decorated them to help in their quest for local political power, not just for themselves but for their families as a whole. What perhaps intrigued me most about this paper was his comparison of these houses with the merchants’ houses of New England, and how these houses in fact have parallels with Protestant meeting houses in Europe. These parallels can be linked to their shared Protestant beliefs. The other fascinating element was that, when the Puritans arrived in New England, they built houses with what was, for the time, a relatively new, modern layout, but with an exterior that was somewhat out of date, with prominent gables and jettied first floors. My own work means that I’m particularly curious about what people build in a colonial setting and how that relates to where they’ve come from – and what it says about how these people saw their place in the world. New Zealand’s British settlers, for example, largely retained a typically British layout, but what they did with the exterior of their houses depended a lot on when they arrived, and varied from person to person.
What I love about going to SHA is not just the diversity of papers and topics covered (I’ve barely scratched the surface here), but the political nature of so many of these papers. So many papers deal with power imbalances in society, whether that’s in relation to gender, ethnicity, class or status, etc, and they discuss this in quite explicit ways. Some of these power imbalances are in the past, but others are in the way archaeology is carried out today – for example, the powerful keynote presentation from Whitney Battle-Baptiste, exhorting us all to read more work by black female archaeologists, which led me to think about my own reading. It’s not something we do a lot of in Aotearoa, in part because there’s currently no historical or modern world archaeology academic position here and in part because so much modern world archaeology gets carried out in a commercial setting (where there is little time or money for carrying out detailed research, and where you don’t get to choose the sites you’re working on, so you can’t select a site to try and answer a particular research question). Historical archaeology, as has been acknowledged almost since the discipline’s development, has a particular power to reveal the stories of the marginalised, but it’s also important to be conscious of our own privilege in carrying out this work.
With thanks to the UC Doctoral Overseas Travel Scholarship, which enabled me to attend this conference.
This post has been surprisingly difficult to write. The first words on a blank page are always so much harder than they have any right to be. It’s that overwhelming sensation of just not knowing how to begin, how to possibly find the right words to start funnelling all you want to say down on to paper. We could begin with who we are (hi, we’re Jessie and Katharine) and what we do (archaeology!), but we’ve been down this road before and it almost feels like we’re starting in the middle. How much backstory do we need for this new chapter?
How about this? Hi. We’re two archaeologists who used to work in post-quake Christchurch, and used to blog about that work. Now, we’re two archaeologists who study Christchurch through the data generated from work we used to do and, not entirely unsurprisingly, have decided to blog about it.
Or, to put it another way, it turns out we’re both suckers for punishment and as incapable of saying no to things – especially our own ideas – as we always have been. Over the last couple of years, we’ve both genuinely missed the act of blog writing – unexpectedly so – especially as our research has grown and we’ve found ourselves going off on tangents that were just crying out to be written up into posts. So, here we are.
Just one of the many asides and tangents we’ve already discovered. I love this so much. Image: Globe 23/03/1876: 1.
We’re both now PhD candidates (I rest my case about being suckers for punishment – J), Katharine at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch and Jessie at La Trobe University in Melbourne. This blog is intended to be something of a way for us to talk about our research – into domestic architecture (Katharine) and material culture (Jessie) – in nineteenth century Christchurch, as well as an outlet for the million and one asides we keep finding along the way. Much of it will be related to Christchurch and the title of the blog is a shout-out to our continued connection to that city, as well as to the broader urban archaeological scope of our interests. We reserve the right, however, to veer slightly further afield from time to time.
To continue setting the scene, it seemed a good idea to devote this first post to a bit of an overview of our research (and, I suppose, of ourselves). Those of you reading this who know us personally may have already heard too much about this, so we forgive you if you just want to look at the pictures. We will be back in the new year (we picked such a great time to launch something new, don’t you agree?) with more posts on all sorts of things. We hope to see you there.
Jessie
I thought long and hard (well, distractedly) about what I wanted to say in this first post and all I could think of was how much there was to write about (something of a theme with me, whoops). With that thought, however, came the realisation that this perspective – a constant awareness of just how much potential there is in the Christchurch archaeological dataset, just how vast the possibilities are – is in itself a fairly crucial part of the why and the what of my current research.
Since the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes, the archaeological dataset from Christchurch has grown exponentially, revealing a complex array of information, artefacts, buildings and sites that connects the Christchurch of today with the physical imprint of its history. I worked in Christchurch from 2012 to 2018, analysing the various European artefact assemblages that were excavated, and it became increasingly apparent that the dataset we were building, site by site and artefact by artefact, was one that should be seen as an integrated whole. The more assemblages we worked with, the more connections we noticed across the archaeology of the city – artefacts that I had seen on sites before, individuals I’d encountered in passing through previous research, patterns in the archaeology and the material culture that only came into focus as each new assemblage added another piece of the puzzle.
Just a bit of stuff. Image: Wendy Gibbs.
I wanted the chance to explore those connections through material culture, to see if I can grasp some of the ways in which the interaction of people and place could be seen in the things people used and the way they used them. And, not content to stop there, I also want to know how Christchurch fitted, in terms of its stuff, with the world around it. How did consumer culture in nineteenth century Christchurch compare to the rest of the British colonial world? Did we have the same stuff, or were there differences? Did those differences contribute, in any way, to the distinct identity that the city developed over time? How much do the things we buy and use have an influence on the communities that we create? Especially in an age of mass production and global trade, whether it’s 150 years ago or right now?
Some of my favourite things. These artefacts were all found on the site of the new Justice and Emergency Services Precinct. Image: J. Garland.
All of which is to say: the scale of the Christchurch archaeological dataset is awesome, I have a lot of questions and all the time I’m spending staring at spreadsheets and wrestling with databases and reading reports will be totally worth it if I can answer even some of them. At the moment, I’m focusing on what was available to the residents of nineteenth century Christchurch: what the artefacts can tell me about how people were getting their goods, where those goods were coming from and who was making those decisions. I’m also looking at patterns of use and discard across the city – what people were throwing away, why, and what it tells me about their relationship with those things. Next year, I’m heading to Canada and the UK (in January, a truly terrible idea, given the ice, snow and Brexit) to work with some very accommodating archaeologists and gather the data needed to explore the global context. It’ll be fun! Also, freezing! Expect some photos of snow.
Me, four weeks from now.
Katharine
Old buildings have long captivated me, particularly the exterior of them, and I can spend many hours happily wandering around, looking at them, taking photos (in fact, this is what I love to do on holidays – it may not make me the most interesting holiday companion…). So it’s perhaps no surprise that, as we began to record many, many 19th century buildings following the earthquakes in Christchurch (more on this process in a later post), I should want to know more about them: about their layout, about the spaces within them, how people used buildings, about gender and buildings, about what they looked and about what this all means. Basically, to understand buildings as fully as I can. I’ll confess, I’m a bit less interested in the timbers and the framing and the roof structure structural elements, but obviously they matter too – and can be used to answer all kinds of questions about trade and the economy and innovation. It’s just that I’m more interested in people, and how they used buildings. Which is what brings me to houses. They seem to me to be the ultimate nexus between people and buildings, stemming from that basic human need for shelter, something, sadly, not everyone is able to enjoy.
The more I thought about houses, the more I wanted to understand why they looked the way they did. It fascinates me that mid-late 19th century urban housing in New Zealand can be so much the same and, at the same time, so different, whether within one city or across the country. There seems to me to be a continuum of appearance. While this was in part driven by what was available to buy, and the influence of pattern books, it was also driven by personal choice. People who were building a house wanted it to look a certain way and I want to understand why people made the choices they did, and how those choices are connected to who they are and how they see their place in the world. In essence, I want to understand how people’s identity is connected to the appearance of their house.
One of the most endlessly fascinating houses in my sample, Linwood House, and its owner, Joseph Brittan. Images: Wikipedia.
But before I can investigate that, I need to know what Christchurch’s houses actually looked like in the 19th century, what the different types of houses were in the city and how this changed between 1850 and 1900. Which, for me, is fascinating data in and of itself, even if it’s involved rather more statistics than I might have liked – numbers have never been my friend… Once I’ve got that data, I can start to look at how this relates to the people who built the houses, to see what types of houses different people, and different groups of people, were building, and what this might tell me about how people were using houses to construct and display their identity in a colonial setting. I’m also quite, quite interested in the city’s identity (don’t get me started on Christchurch as an ‘English’ city and it’s probably not a good idea to mention the ‘first four ships’ either) and how domestic architecture might be related to that. Whether or not time will allow for that, though…
So, that’s us. We hope, dear reader, that you’ll follow along on our voyage of discovery. We’re excited to share our research and our love of archaeology and all the wonderful and mind-boggling things the past can reveal with you, and hope that you enjoy this as as much as we do!
The city remains 
