Colonial settlers were blazing it! 420 pipestems and more from the pits with Isaac!

[Pacivilwarluke]

Wow what a day today in the colonial pits in SC! First a thank you to Bill D. For urging me to use a sifter! It helped immensely! Ended up with exactly 420 pipestems and bowls! Also tons of pottery, hammer, hoe, hand iron, and Isaac got a half of a Georgian wig curler! I also got a very old bottle top, some musketballs, crystal/ glass goblet, dad got 6 buttons a escutcheon plate, some saddle parts etc. we had a blast and we are really tired now, dug for about 5 hours! HH!

 

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[Pacivilwarluke]

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[Pacivilwarluke]

Half a wig curler

 

[cjon455]

That's a great day, love all that clay!, the pottery fragments are cool also, good job!

 

[joeyfresh]

Hell yeah, you did great! You've got all colonial pottery types represented...creamware, slipware, westerwald....and you cleaned up big time on the stems. Bill got me into pit digging and I love it!

 

[joeyfresh]

Colonial settlers were blazing it! 420 pipestems and more from the pits with ...

Oh yeah, that wine glass stem is really cool too! Where do you live that you can dig a pit in the summer. I would have had a heat stroke......I sweat my butt of digging one in the winter!

 

[Vino]

Thats Awsome! !
Looks like a real fun day!
Bill has been trying to get me to dig for awhile now..
Love the wig curler.

 

[Isaac]

This was my FIRST time trash pit digging. My arms are sore but I had a freaking BLAST!!!!!!! Thank you so much for the invite Luke!!!!!! I'm HOOKED on colonial pit digging now!!!!! I really want to do some more pit digging up in Virginia now. SC is such a cool place to hunt and again thanks Luke for introducing me to a whole new world of this hobby - trash pit digging! Can't believe we got all those pipes, you weren't joking when you said there's a lot of pipes there o.o I'm really happy this was one of the most tiring and fun days of detecting I've ever had! I love the wig curler. Luke let out a gasp when I picked it up from my side of the sifter... I thought it was another pipe stem! I had no idea what is what but he sure did. Sorry Luke

 

[Pacivilwarluke]

Oh yeah, that wine glass stem is really cool too! Where do you live that you can dig a pit in the summer. I would have had a heat stroke......I sweat my butt of digging one in the winter!

Charkeston SC and Savannah GA ( although I'm from PA) Trust me, I was killed after 5 hours!

 

[Bill D. (VA)]

Wow - that sifter did make a huge difference. That's quite a pile of pipe stems, but its too bad there weren't more intact bowls in the pit. Once you clean up all those stems you can do the regression analysis we talked about earlier. With that large of a sample size the result will be quite accurate. And after cleaning them up, check closely for maker's marks or decorations that may be present. But based on the pottery I'd say it's a 1750-1820 site, and I think that's what you told me earlier. And I love those brownish yellow shards on the far right of the 2nd pic. That style is called Staffordshire combed slipware, and it's one of my favorites, and dates to that same period. I also see a couple of nice iron artifacts in that hoe and flat iron. Have you finish digging out that spot yet? Don't forget to keep checking in the vicinity as there are likely to be more pits to be found, and possibly one that has a lot more black glass. Great dig guys, and hope you can continue to pull some goodies out of the ground.

 

[Pacivilwarluke]

This was my FIRST time trash pit digging. My arms are sore but I had a freaking BLAST!!!!!!! Thank you so much for the invite Luke!!!!!! I'm HOOKED on colonial pit digging now!!!!! I really want to do some more pit digging up in Virginia now. SC is such a cool place to hunt and again thanks Luke for introducing me to a whole new world of this hobby - trash pit digging! Can't believe we got all those pipes, you weren't joking when you said there's a lot of pipes there o.o I'm really happy this was one of the most tiring and fun days of detecting I've ever had! I love the wig curler. Luke let out a gasp when I picked it up from my side of the sifter... I thought it was another pipe stem! I had no idea what is what but he sure did. Sorry Luke :lol:

Thanks man I'm thrilled I could show you my site! That wig curler made me jealous haha so happy you got to dig down here!

 

[Professor of Engineering]

Fantastic finds! You definitely hit the jackpot, congratulations!

 

[s.c.shooter]

Awesome finds!

 

[terpfan]

That pit digging looks like a blast. Congrats on all of the success. I've never even heard of a wig curler, I need to ask google how that worked!

 

[Argentium]

With all those pipe stems I'm wondering if the women were puffing away as well as the men ?

 

[DownNDirty]

That's a butt load of great finds-I bet it was a blast!

 

[Bill D. (VA)]

With all those pipe stems I'm wondering if the women were puffing away as well as the men ?

A woman smoking a pipe in colonial America was apparently a rare occurrence, but not totally unheard of. But even as late as the 1920s, women only comprised about 10% of the total smoking population so that should help to confirm why the colonial numbers were so low. And a very large number of stems being found on a single site is not uncommon. Usually tavern pits have the greatest number of clay pipe stems and bowls due to the nature of their business, but sometimes an individual house site can produce hundreds. Pictured below are 800+ stems and bowls I recovered from a single pit at a known late 1600s to mid-1700s house site. And at another huge pit at a prestigious manor site my friends and I have dug literally thousands of stems and bowls from an expansive pit over the last 10+ years. But this place did a lot of entertaining which would account this high number.

 

[Brother Al]

420? Pipes? Blazing it?
Too funny...... I hereby nominate you for caption of the day.....lol. Good digs.

 

[CASPER-2]

 

[Pacivilwarluke]

Wow - that sifter did make a huge difference. That's quite a pile of pipe stems, but its too bad there weren't more intact bowls in the pit. Once you clean up all those stems you can do the regression analysis we talked about earlier. With that large of a sample size the result will be quite accurate. And after cleaning them up, check closely for maker's marks or decorations that may be present. But based on the pottery I'd say it's a 1750-1820 site, and I think that's what you told me earlier. And I love those brownish yellow shards on the far right of the 2nd pic. That style is called Staffordshire combed slipware, and it's one of my favorites, and dates to that same period. I also see a couple of nice iron artifacts in that hoe and flat iron. Have you finish digging out that spot yet? Don't forget to keep checking in the vicinity as there are likely to be more pits to be found, and possibly one that has a lot more black glass. Great dig guys, and hope you can continue to pull some goodies out of the ground.

Thank you! Yes, 1750s to 1820s, and there was a tavern somewhere that I'm thinking I may have found finally! I'm know here near done, there are many other pits I haven't even dug out, but I'm heading home to PA so they'll have to wait for my college break in December. Woods will be better then too! I love the combed slipware, although I wish everything wasn't so smashed. I supposed beggar can't be choosers! I'm still stoked to have a cool site down here, and I'm thinking I will be able to get well over 500 next time I'm down. Every bucket seemed to have 10 in it!