Ceramic Archeology

 We leave such telltale clues to our whereabouts with our cast-offs. I often will dig a hole to plant a tree or simply till the garden or a flower bed and turn up bits of old glass, pieces of porcelain, even shards of ceramics with decorations still intact.

 Last week Tom and I were digging a hole to plant a dogwood when he pulled this chunk of dinnerware out of the ground:

 This was without any decoration. It was a thick, white piece of ceramic. The edge is smooth so it's likely a shard of a bowl or perhaps a heavy plate. These things always raise the same questions: how did it get here? who used it? when was it last seen?

 Tom stood and fingered this and asked those same questions. Pinehaven (the house) has been inhabited since the late  nineteenth century. That's when William and Susanna Sholly built the house. But the first owner of the property goes back to 1841 when Samuel and William Fisher bought the land. Which one of these owned this bowl?

 Tom wondered if this was where a dump was located. In those days things were discarded on the property. There was no handling of trash but for what efforts the property owner undertook. A broken bowl would have been thrown to the ground.

 But why so deep? Why was this found nearly a foot and a half down? And why beside Clayton Road? That would have been too visible a location for discarded trash.

 Same reasoning, too, for the outhouse. Surely it wouldn't have been located so near the road. Otherwise an outhouse was a common place to discard broken objects.

 We'll never know, of course. But an old piece of Pinehaven popped up again in 2018 and the answers, though buried in time, don't stop these questions being asked.