Time Team S06E01 Burslem,.Stoke-on-Trent

everyone knows the name of Wedgewood when it comes to pottery and this is what they have in mind this blue and white Design This famous throughout the world but few people know that it was here in bam on the outskirts of stoke on Trent that Josiah wedgewood's climbed to Fame and Fortune first began this is actually the site of his first factory which was at the heart of the pottery industry when it took off in the 18th century but does any of it remain under the paving stones of present day bam over the next few days time team have got the Fantastic opportunity to dig up this area and find [Music] out [Music] [Music] [Music] bam is one of six towns which make up modern day Stoke on Trent later this year a new exhibition Cent is going to be built here to celebrate its Heritage as one of the early centers of pottery making but first before building can begin archaeologists want to make sure that it's not going to destroy any important remains still surviving on this site hey Tone come a look at this this this is wedgewood's first factory at the ivy house and we're actually sort of trying to line up where it is that's right ni bill that's right just over here somewhere yeah yeah just just on the corner over there under just perhaps just behind where the traffic lights are we don't know absolutely for sure it's difficult to put all the maps together but we know it's definitely in that area present with the with the big house this big house here on the right there so the that building would have been off just there somewhere that's right now we know that building was built in 1751 it was owned by John and Thomas wed who were jiah's cousins now when jiah um was 29 in 1759 he wanted to go into business on his own John John and Thomas were ready to retire they rented him this Factory and he went into business here on his own and this is this is the site of it over there if if we know where it was and what it looked like and we've even got houses of the period still up that's right why are we bothering to do this excavation well I think well there's nothing left there now where the Ia house was but I think this has to do with jiah Wedgwood he was a great man of the 18th century it was a great time of change in the pottery industry he he himself mastered many developments in Pottery which we now take for granted he was a great chemist and he was a great leader of his time if we could find some evidence of what he was really doing at this site it would be great what do you mean what was he doing we know was throwing pots well we don't know what pots we don't know exactly what he was making here um we could find all sorts of things the problem is Tony if you turn that over this is what was there in the 19th century this huge meat market and none of that's left none of that's left and we don't really know what that's done in terms of its foundations to the the earlier archaeology underneath I mean it might have completely worked it out might it well I should think it probably did I mean could anything have survived the building of this huge Victorian Meat Market the only way to find out is to dig and before we can do that we need to work out exactly where Josiah wedgewood's first factory actually stood get how you getting on what I'm trying to do is identify the site of of wedgewood's first poter here the Ivy House Works um and we're looking we've got a plan of 1835 which was probably put together round about the time the meat market was being built and we can see on here the the meat market against the background of the pottery and then we've got a map of 1878 which shows the Market Hall which you can overlay overb and on that one we've actually got the position of the town hall and big house so we can start to fit them together that's very good isn't it and yeah if we put translate all that onto the mod maps see it all on on on the modern base we can actually start to work out where they lay out the fact the pottery was it's a bit complicated that so I simplified it onto this you can see the area of the yellow is the meat Market the red is the wedgewood's first factory and the thick black lines are the modern detail that's the Town Hall that's big house across the road so we're effectively standing on the corner there then that's it this flower this flower bed here and there's another flower bed behind us uh you can see there that that red building we think is the Ivy House Cottage this is here that's right yeah it's just it's just in this this strip down down here home the the the Ivy House Cottage if it still survives would be coming across this this corner here we've just got about four or 5 m of it if it if it survives below here so one trench line down there I think so we also really ought to have a look for this Kil shouldn't we really yeah yeah that's over where the um the circular band stand behind I think it' be nice to take that Band Stand away I think that looks horrible that it's a fairly big Target it's like 15 8 8 to 12 M across we could get a trench right the way if it still survives then we should hit it so trench one will be opened up here and trench two will go in behind the Bandstand but I must admit My worry is that we're not going to find anything but Victorian Rubble though one of our Pottery experts is more optimistic we should find something here there's been Potter making on this site since the late 17th century and right the way through the 18th century so you've got to find something hopefully [Music] Wedgewood now I know this is Wedgewood but what what are the dates of these that particular piece was made about 1790 1795 it looks completely modern doesn't it and what about these those were a little bit earlier um between about 1770 to about 1780 so this is what he was making towards the end of his life but the period that we're interested in over the next two or three days is when he was at the Ivy houseworks and there's nothing there yes that's because ideally we'd like to be able to move some of these pieces and some of those pieces into the Gap we know that he was capable of making this when he came here we know that by the time he left he was making that so this is what he made earlier this bizarre don't pick it up by the handle please what because it's 250 years old we're not sure if the handle's going to stay there any longer so I spent my whole life learning to pick things up by the handle so this is the ear this is would you call this rcoo yes it's um in the form of a pineapple and that was one of the um things about the makoko it was all uh natural and animal form so you've got pineapples got cauliflowers and shells all sorts of strange peculiar forms that were very fashionable at that time and and this is what he was making later that's right moving more towards the near classical simpler forms more elegant more refined so if we find some of this we'll know that he was still making this when he was at Ivy House whereas if there's none of that but just this we'll know he changed over straight away yes I mean hopefully you'll be finding some of both Josiah Wedgewood was only based at the Ivy House works for three years between 175 9 and 1763 so finding the right bits of pottery on a factory site that was in use before and after his time sounds like a bit of a long shot to me but as with any Town Center site before we can get that far we have to watch out for the things we don't want to dig up such as power cables and gas Mains yeah picking up lots of stuff here what right the way down yeah right to to there stops there meanwhile inside the town hall Robin's in his element because he's got his hands on original documents written by Josiah Wedgewood himself I understand that there are 75,000 documents relating to the 18th century period of the manufacturer so that he wrote well a lot of them he wrote thousands and thousands of of of pieces uh documents which throw uh an incredible light on the activity of a man who was uh foremost in the field of UR Weare and pottery in Europe if not in the world Josiah kept records of his experiments and we do know that while he was at the Ivy House Works he was trying to perfect the glaze he would need to produce white wear Pottery what was so significant about this white wear of his it looks to me just like the stuff you get in wws oh how could you it was very important because basically there were two types of Ceramics in England the everyday Potter or the imported Oriental porcelaines and the porcelaines made in the Far East and in England by Chelsea and B were incredibly expensive and Wedgewood by making cream colored earthernware which was suitable for the tables made it accessible to the rising middle classes because of the Industrial Revolution and also the aristocracy once the queen had chosen to use a tea and coffee service made by Wedgewood then everybody followed suit out in trench 1 it hasn't taken long to come down onto some archaeology and it looks quite impressive I Phil looks a bit different have you got here well well we've got some good archaeology but uh I think it must be the got to be the meat market yeah it's what the looking at those angles fil they they're fitting ex exactly with the alignment and Corners hang on a where exactly is our trench then your trench is going right in this cor so this this this Edge down here then this Edge down here yeah is that that's this wall here that's bang Oldfield yeah that's that wall there the next job here in trench 1 is to record this layer of archaeology and then find out what's underneath it because a map exists showing this site as a Pottery Works 40 years earlier in 1720 and at that time the area was surrounded by Countryside it's um very interesting because in this area where we are digging at the present time you can see that U there are a number of bottle ovens yeah they're all over the place aren't they these these sens absolutely everywhere and everyone s of Back Garden presum these ones in the back Gardens they would have looked sort of like this with a farm Cottage and then the bottle oven just sort of built on the back really well that's a good picture of uh typical farm and bottle oven around about 1650 and of course it was all down to uh the poor quality of uh of the soil at the time so agriculture wasn't really feasible so they supplemented their income by um by turning to making pots um there was coal outcropped on the site and oh that would have made the soil poor but would have enabled them to find the Kil straight away yes but I mean this is 1720 so presumably in our excavations we might hope to find not only pottery from jiah wedgewood's occupation of bersin but also from pottery making going back 100 years perhaps even more before his time outside in the rain progress is slow although we found archaeology in trench 1 so far we've got nothing in trench 2 sure I mean we're slap banging where at the middle of where the Kil should be the should be it looks like it's gone then certain else from here yeah see the natural goes right up to the surface doesn't it if we look hang on there's a load of brick in here bits of pottery so this could well be it if all we've got is just like the very base left Phil yeah what you got for us it looks like we might have the kill Tony really good how do you know that's a kill well look well we don't know for sure but look look see you see that brick there bit F brick that's incredibly fired incredibly high and then above it as no pointed out we got saggers which are the the pots they used to fire the uh the other pots inside and look and then we've actually got the piece of pot what are you WR to that again well it's it's biscuit wear which means it's just been fired once hasn't been glazed and it well it could be cream wear it's the right period but it could be a bit early could be a bit later but effectively this could be wedgewood's Kil then could be the one yeah so are you going to cut the trench further back we got to we got to basically the bit that we're in has been totally chopped Away by the steps and has been totally landscaped away I mean we should go back probably take out another couple of slabs of the uh of the paving area I'd like to see more of it in Plan before you will see more of it you will see more of it we're going to dig it up [Music] well we may not have found the remnants of the Ivy House Factory maybe it is lost under the meat market but it could well be that that is the remains of that [Music] Kil at one time the skyline around bam would have looked like this there were close to two 2,000 Pottery kills in the area now only 47 remain seven of which are preserved at the gladston factory Museum although these kils date to the Victorian period they're almost identical to those that would have stood at the Ivy House works it's terribly vocative seeing it all laid out here isn't it angel I'm presuming you'd have had masses of people shoveling coling constantly to get it to fire yes coal would have been used throughout the firing process look oh I see so this is the actual kill and the bottle shaped thing we can see is just a sort of cover around the outside of it yes it's called the H it's to protect the kilm from the weather and the wind the coal goes into fire mouths like these there are eight around this oven but probably you'd find five or six at a smaller K like our Wedgewood site I mean that's I'm quite interested in what's actually at ground level because of course we're not going to find it surviving up built up high like that what we're going to find is the remains of the foundations as it yes there'll be the the circle of the K and Ash pits rather than fire mouths at ground level assuming it would have been incredibly hot in here how long did it take to fire them these kils took about a day to fill a day and a half to heat up day and a half to cool down day to empty so five or six days for one firing that's almost a week for each firing but have we found a Kil at our side well Bill's not seen enough to be sure as yet but what we do have are bits of pottery and something that looks like a factory yard surface now this pottery from the layer above dates from the late 17th century perhaps the earlier 18th century and they also had other posture of the same dates I think so does that mean that this floor yard is likely to have been from wedgewood's first factory that's right I think well what it shows us I think is that this this yard surface is certainly earlier than the meat market meat market was built in 1835 so this this pushes this yard surface back probably into the 18th century supported by the facts the the bits of poery that were lying on this surface above it so this could very well be part of the Ivy House Factory itself and if it survives here then it could survive elsewhere geophysics are currently doing a radar survey in the car park at the back of this site and we'll get their results tomorrow Stuart believes there's an even better chance of the Ivy House work surviving here because it was outside the area of the Victorian Meat Market but that's about it for today except for a chance to see Victor's impression of how the Ivy House Works must have looked on this site let's hope we can find more of it tomorrow beginning of day two and a lot of our hopes are pinned on trench 2 there's a lot of archaeology here which some of us are hoping is associated with the kill there's certainly a great swirling 18th century floor here which is why we're pulling this trench back and back over here this is trench one that's the one with the beautiful red tile 19th century Meat Market floor in it and whatever's under that floor has been nicely sealed in so we've recorded the floor now we're taking it up to see what's underneath and this is trench three which we didn't have time to do anything on yesterday so we're starting now it seems a shame to have to break up these Victorian floors but now that they've been recorded we need to know what's beneath them our new trench trench 3 is positioned outside the area where the meat market stood and we're hoping that we might find the remains of workshops which were part of the Ivy House Pottery Works but these trenches are only in one half of the site we still have the car Park area to investigate a picture up John all right Tony that the g f results yes we're getting some nice responses Tony um this is just one of the traces we we've done a line along here and there's a bit of noise a bit of sort of interference and then this abrupt change at this point here and everything to the right um that suggests it's the meat market where it's actually cut into the deposits and so removed all all the earlier evidence so what we want to do is put a trench along here that takes in the edge of the meat market to confirm that it is indeed that and then to look at this area of disturbance in trench 2 we're opening up an even wider area in search of the Kiln base and ideally some wedge with Pottery to go with it while in trench one our decision to break up the Victorian floors seems to have paid off already hello Jenny hello how's it going not too bad we found a big stash of this brown this is interesting stuff where is it from down there it's just from in there I think we've got a sort of pit cut into the natural right well this is this is 17th century or early 18th century stuff this is pre iy house so a look is it all is it all the same date I think it is you know model wear model wear there stacks of it oh slipware this is a good this is a good late 17th century early 18th century deposit here shs people were posting here before before J got got here brilli well we're not even halfway through day two and we've got an amazing number of FS how do they compare with what you found in the past well some surprises we've a collection of pots here from the Museum's collection which we brought along to give the diggers some idea of what they might be expecting to find um this is probably one of the ear earliest pieces we have from the site yet it's it's a medieval cooking pot rimsha just like that one there Mike nice yeah see that fantastic very very similar probably 14th century yeah [Music] um this one here late 17th century tankered good match there from trench one yeah isn't that good yeah and this brute here is what is known as a but pot ah yeah um a product for which bur was very well known in the 17th century and a good matching Shard there for that type of wear is that to put cold butter in it's for storing and transporting butter from the north staire dairy farms all right this is up to the beginning of the 18th century but this down here presumably is more the time when jiah wedgew would have been around how much of this kind of pottery have we got as yet nothing this is exactly what we're looking for this is a Potter that would wedge would would have been familiar with that he was probably making well thankfully it isn't actually raining and we're making good progress in trench 2 but at the moment Phil has been called across to trench 3 look at that oh look at that hang on who cut the engine look at this stuff down here amazing it's pretty good isn't it just a small dump of Po what are you going to do with it then it's nice to have the occasional find on time team isn't it have you got a skip is that all 19th century well look at by the stuff that's just come out it does look to be yeah David yeah that's a painter's Mark well you've got the printed side on that side there reallyy sweet so pretty at this it's gorgeous well that's a printed pattern um early 19th century 1810s 1820s um I think looking at The Shard I've got in my hand here we can attribute that exactly to a manufacturer none other than Enoch wooden sons who were operating here in buron in the early well the early part of the 19th century most of the early parts of the 19th century now be honest with us is this rubbish or does it actually tell you anything I'm absolutely fascinated by this Enoch wood is a very important character and he was uh one of the first antiquarian archeologists operating in the six towns he went around bersem town center popping little time capsules of wooden Sun's factory made Wares into the ground and I think this is what we've got here so what do we do with all this stuff now do we have to record it and I I think we can probably whip it out fairly quickly maybe maybe Spade it out well we wanted to find lot lot of pottery and we've certainly found some it all dates to the 1830s and without losing too much time the job now is to work through it and pick out a representative selection for the museum hey look at that the spout oh what an what an awesome thing that is Ed yeah why not what I don't know what it is is it a bird finding so much Pottery is certainly a spectacle for the local people watching and today they also had the chance to talk to two members of the histrionics group who we've invited along to remind everyone of just how different life was when Wedgewood was based here in the early 1760s this is exactly the sort of costume people would have worn at the time of Wedgewood and this is sort of upper middle class I'm more likely to be one of his customers than one of his workers to get an idea of what was involved in the factory production process during Josiah wedgewood's time corenza has gone back to the gladston museum where we want to attempt to make a replica of a Wedgewood creamware vase so you ready to go with that now Ken yes we can give it a try right we've got a Wedgewood period wheel over here which we'd quite like you to use the first of many Craftsman who will be involved is Ken badley a modern day Wedgewood Potter it'll be just the the outline shape it won't have the handles oh right so it's just the the body and you put the lid on it and all that sort of thing okay this is the power end of the wheel if Ken would like to come and stand here right this would have been a child or a woman's job oh right so this is I should be doing this so your job is to turn that around all right that turns the wheel and that turns the wheel at that end uh it's geared as well so we can always change the speed does Ken change the speed no you need to think uh for Ken so he'll put the clay on the wheel and now we want plenty of speed for the centering throwing the vase on the wheel is just the first stage in the production line process tomorrow once it's had time to dry it'll be shaped on a lathe and Victor will have a go at painting a design on it in Ken's opinion an experienced Potter like himself should have been able to throw about 120 vases in a day and thanks to an original document in the Wedgewood archive we know how much each one would have cost probably the best example is this one which is a purle one without a medallion very simple 9 in high 9 in high roughly the same height and you've got the various um ingredients biscuit firing which would have been a penny gloss firing which is toppen the total amount for this is 4 Shillings 10 p and three farings gosh that's quite a lot of money quite a lot of money it probably would have then sold for a Guinea in trench three Phil's still up to his neck in 19th centur Pottery Stone the crows certainly we've found more than our volunteer pot washers expected but our best hope of finding some Wedgewood Pottery has still got to be trenched too which is looking better and better I think what we've got here Mick is a part of a killing stretcher wow that's fantastic isn't it can you see the way it curves that's that's brilliant let me show you on a drawing it's amazing that that bit's left isn't it everything else is dug away that's right what we've got is is this part of this circle which is the outer part of the Kil structure which is called the H now if you look at that how that would have looked sort of actually stood up that's like in plan looking down from the above so you look at it from the side it would be sort of a bit like this it's a bottle shaped a bottle shaped so is this the brick inside it here that's right with buttresses or something on it I think they're probably buttresses but what we haven't got is what would have been inside this which would have been the oven another circular structure and there would have been a passageway inside for the men to work there would have been fir mes regularly spaced around the actual oven men would have worked inside this this Gap in between the oven and the H and what I think we've got here is uh part of this kill and oven structure coming across like that now I think we might just have clipped the oven wall up here and there's some quite interesting stuff in the Cent well we go look at that got a section there let's go yeah what is it that you want to show us well around here Tony I think there's some evidence that there could be earlier kils now we think as as we were saying this is part part of the fracture that was here in 1835 a later version of The Ivy house but beneath it you can see there's 1 2 3 four layers of bricks I'm not sure if it's to do with this flu entirely or not but they could be the floor surfaces of earlier kils so those that layer of three bricks there could be wedgewood's own kill well it's possible it's possible so how are we going to establish that well what I think we we need to do is to actually have a look somehow at these earlier deposits how we're going to do that without destroying this quite interesting stuff we could do yeah we need to have a chance about that and decide how best to progress this okay time for a late lunch and a lesson in Etiquette but also the chance to see a genuine Wedgewood cream wear plate so we can recognize one when we dig it up 18th century Forks are quite a new thing you've still got the knife with this bold at the end which is for picking up peas that's just about allowable going out of fashion go there what would wedgewood's workers have eaten off they'd probably have eaten off pter um whereas Wedgewood himself would have ured the latest cream wear was shown to his guests he was very shrewd at marketing his products and he would always make sure that this was shown off to everybody so they got the maximum possible sales and publicity the Sun's shining we're pulling in the crowds and and every one of our trenches is stuffed with archaeology how often can we say that on time team what you got well it's an ale measure and it looks as though we've got nearly all of it I'm just trying to piece it together we've certainly got these bits that fit together what's that b there well that's a seal and apparently that sort of authenticates the measure to tell you whether it's that you're getting a full Pint the sort of thing you would have had in an inn um it has a crown on it in the middle and below it it should have um the initials of the Monarch uh but we can't read them what sort of period any idea well we think it's late 17th early 18th century what else have you found in the trench lots of interesting Potter all the same date and part of a kiln a k can we get down there Jen can we come and have a look only a very small bit of the Kiln remains but in a construction trench next to it there are lots more fragments of early 18th century tankers these tankers and the measuring jug are finished items and could have come from the Bluebell Pub which we know was outside the Town Hall in the early 1700s and it's the deed to this Pub which has got Robin excited because it gives us information about an even earlier period of pottery making indeed but I think this is wonderful because uh and so here we have in 1635 John Daniel of the waste the Elder of bam in the county of Stafford Potter and we know that he was living on this site because he described himself as of the waste so here we have Pottery being produced on this site uh what over over 360 years ago which is is absolutely wonderful in trench three we've now dug out most of the 1830s pottery and have come down onto a new layer of archaeology relating to the 1700s there's talk that we could have found another Kil here but it's early days yet and really the story of this trench to day has been the sheer quantity of pottery we've had to deal with Miranda there must be a ton of this stuff coming out of our dig now you're not going to wash all of it are you well there's been a fairly thorough sample taken that's going to be washed it'll be bagged marked up it'll go down to the museum and yes it's going to stay with us not everything from the site but a fair bit why why are you so excited about this well some of the pieces have got marks on uh that's a fragment to one it's en not wooden Suns we know which Factory it was we know when it was deposited we've got marked pieces but we've got unmarked pieces as well this type of wear industrial slipware was never marked now we know that they're en not wood because they're found in the same context so therefore we can start to match these pieces with complete pieces in museums and start to say yes those pieces are re not wood we're actually starting to take pieces that are Anonymous and attribute them to factories all over the world presum all over the world this is very much collected in America so you're saying that before our dig you didn't know who made this sort of pottery we know that it was made by a lot of different factories but trying to attribute any particular wees to a particular Factory beforehand was almost impossible this is pretty well unique I must admit I do like this chamber part you're putting back together again here yeah can I pick this up you see that Tony that' be a bit dangerous to use wouldn't it just a little bit yes what we've really want is Wedgewood isn't it do you think we can find any here well it's going to be down here somewhere you just got to dig in the right place in the car park the tarmac taken a lot of getting through but eventually trench 4 has come down onto a floor surface which could be part of the Ivy House Works jefis have now completed their radar survey and are suggesting we open up another trench but what this shows is that this area here that I've highlighted in pink um suggests that those wall foundations um possibly floors Rubble surviving in this area and that also ties in with the map evidence here right so trench 5 gets underway but we'll have to wait for tomorrow to see if that does as well as the others all day we've been looking for pottery and we've found some in fact I don't think I've ever seen so many broken pots in the whole of my life trouble is none of it's Wedgewood although the diggers do tell me that it's very rare to find broken Wedgewood around here and all day we've been looking for kils and we found three although none of them are Wedgewood either this one's a beauty but it's 19th century so tomorrow we're going to dig down below it onto what's hopefully an earlier Kil and then maybe just maybe we'll find the missing piece of the jigsaw a piece of josi Wedgewood Pottery beginning of day three we've got this beautiful 19th century Kiln and we're trying to excavate below it to see if there's an earlier Kil underneath Mick you reckon this is pretty good don't you I think this is fantastic I think it's one of the best preserved most relevant and obvious bits of archaeology we've ever found and I just hope they can conserve it as part of the development you know yeah but we still haven't found the evidence of Wedgewood underneath have we no no Phil yes how long will it be before you start digging pretty imminent actually Tony we've got the drawing done last few photographs and a bit of other description and then we're ready to go and then how long will it take oh I mean I don't think it should be a long job what we got to do is get the evidence well this is the trench I want to keep my eye on today because it would really finish off what's been a marvelous dig if we could find some archaeology connected with Josiah Wedgewood himself hey Tony don't it got some Wedgewood at last look at that what is this last part to be made on this site by E wedworth look it's dated a dated piece too where'd you get that it was here when I got here this morning morning but I wasn't here last night get back in there you fraud don't come out until you found the real stuff clearly someone in a local Factory has been busy just as we will be today at wedgewood's present day Factory where we plan to finish off our replica creamware vase this doesn't look nearly as modern as the rest of the factory is this the sort of lath that Wedgewood would have used this is exactly the sort of L that Wedgewood would have had he introduced this into the ceramic industry in 176 3 oh that's exactly our period for the factory up at berland absolutely perfect as with the Rope wheel yesterday it was a woman's job to provide the power I feel it doing my hips good already introducing a lathe to the Pottery business meant that Wedgewood could produce more precisely and elaborately shaped Ceramics the design of this lathe hasn't been bettered to this day and Wedgewood still use it for Prestige wear requiring specialized decoration is there a little sort of non-critical I could have a go out I'm sure it wasn't making this weaving noise when you were doing it's because you probably got the tool quite firm in your hand right okay A bit F put your put your left hand actually under the tool that's it [Music] right dear it can smooth seems once it's been shaped the vase is burnished it actually closes the pores of the actual piece that's amazing I can see the Shine the Light reflecting off it sort of moving up that's incredible a bit of water on to the the footing for the vase is also stuck on at this stage in the process a lot stop fil to Tony def Tony I think we you it pay you to get over it we we think we've got what you want David can you come over to this trench yeah what you got for knew we wouldn't let you down oh what's this have a look at that what do you thinkig of that then David is this cream wear that's cream wear now what can you tell us about that I can tell you that that's that's the biz that's the right period That's 1760s it's a plate 10in plate um if it's not Wedgewood that was made by whoever it followed him immediately that's that's the period so how can we establish whether any thing that we might pull up is Wedgewood rather than the people who came after him we could hope for a mark but uh that that's that really is a long shot where did you find it it's just in this material this buildup you see we here's the bricks this is what we think is the floor and we've got this buildup there's another piece coming out yeah oh yeah you didn't just break that and put it in did you and we oh yeah oh there's loads of it too look that's only one bag full did they Mark the bottom we don't know that they marked it at this period certainly during the later 60s Wedgewood was marking his Pottery on a more regular basis but it would be nice to see this alongside other material of the same period that would help us to determine more closely the date of production excellent well really what we want to do then is get the rest of this layer out and if we can get these PHS processed you can have a look at them without the dir on them hey look hey it fits can you find a bit more more come on what's significant is that we found a layer that contains only pottery from the Wedgewood period or earlier this tells us that the Kiln remains above this layer aren't any later than 1780 and it should also help us to fix a date for the floor or earlier Kil beneath it so the Archaeology is going well it's just a shame about the weather but even the rain isn't going to stop us now well maybe just for a bit meanwhile in the nice dry modern Wedgewood Factory we've moved down the production line to yet another specialist this is's a DOT box it's an extruder all right comes out the bottom here should I catch it for you yeah place it on the butt right oh and it's all shaped by the sort of it's got a design in it making the handles that's a former by the way right what bend it all the way around one handle okay okay once the handles have hardened they can be stuck on lously this is effectively acting as glue that's right put the pot up place it on and before long we've got our complete pot which is now ready to go in the Kiln this is the first of two firings it undergo before emerging as a recognizable creamware vase we obviously haven't got time to do that so from now on we'll be working on another pot which has been prepared for us in advance and it's at this stage that our artist Victor Ambrose has the hardest challenge of all because he only has today to master the skill of hand painting [Music] pottery look at this F this is really interesting saw that what is it well well Neil's just watched us and looked at it and he's told us something really exciting about this what they seem to be doing was making these teapots based on their the house that they lived in is this wedge well John and Thomas Wedgwood jiah wedgwood's uncles owned that house they were Potters they probably made this but it puts this certainly into the 1750s perhaps ji wed would made it who knows this is definitely our period that's fantastic isn't it look that's that's a fit isn't it that's perfect it's incredible Miranda has brought an identical teapot from the museum which confirms our fragment dates to the late 1750s so I mean is this a functional teapot or is it something that you stand on the sideboard and admire it's it's very much a functional teapot but it's a sort of thing of course it would have been a an item of conversation when it came to tea what an unusual teapot it certainly would be conversation yeah hi how's it going things are hotting up here at the moment bill this is starting to look quite interesting yeah nice yeah can you so explain to Bill what's going on what I've basically got I've got the foundations for wall running through here and I've got evidence for sort of Road out here hard compact surfaces I've actually got a gas man out there as well and um I seem to have sort of flooring materials going back that way that's tied together really well with the the original survey you know the the 1835 survey of The potw Works which is where we're starting from that's great um we've measured that in on on the master survey we're right in this series of buildings along here and this this is is perfect for the edge of that building so this straight wall is in fact the outside wall so we we originally thought it might be curving away from us so we opened up that area to see if we had another kill going kill them crazy at last got a straight walk so um what well this is good news we found the back wall of the Ivy House works in the special skills unit at Wedgewood Victor's coping well with the problems of working on a slippery curved surface now it's going around we got to be careful I don't smudge any of it and he's getting heavy just as Josiah Wedgewood used popular events of his day we want to make our 1760s V a commemoration of time team's visit to Bam I mean the details absolutely incredible each grape and all the veins Kenza is looking through the original Wedgewood patent books to choose a design for the Border oh no these would be all hand painted and depending on the complexity of the Border they would be paid a different rate and it's interesting because quite a few women as well as men were actually painting the borders on plates really and some of them were earning anything up to 18 Shillings a week which would be quite a lot of money L those so we've done it we've got the final piece in the jigsaw yes it certainly looks like it um we' we a good quantity of material now which could very well have been made by Wedgewood um certainly dating to the 1760s the thing that strikes me about it is that it's mostly that cream wear yeah which was becoming fashionable during the 1760s but we do have a little bit here of the is this Roco the moroco that that's a teapot made in the form of a melon with roulette decoration and it would have been colored with green and yellow glazes even if we didn't find a piece with wedgewood's name on it these are all Ceramics which could have been in production at the ivy houseworks During the period Josiah Wedgewood was based there between 1759 and 1763 it's been a hugely enjoyable 3 days and more productive than we could have imagined our evaluation work has proved that bits of the Ivy House Pottery Works do survive trench three in the end found the remains of workshops as did trench 4 and trench 5 uncovered the back wall but as is typical of time team it's never over until the last Spade has gone into the ground M what are you doing digging a big hole you're supposed to be filling this in blim me got some fire that lot wow this is amazing this is only 5% of it you're kidding no it's 5% that's all that's there the rest is on the spoil over there just first look I mean it's all once fired stuff this is old this is unlike we've had one or two shards of this stuff coming up elsewhere but only as background but this is amazing we're into a very early deposit this hard St hard fired stuff Midlands purple 15th century 16th century on closer inspection what's been discovered in trench 5 is evidence of a 16th century Kiln and these are incredibly important finds because they suggest that pottery making here in bam in the late 1500s was on a much bigger ger scale than had been previously thought hi Victor how are you getting on have you finished it yet last Duchess look at that just the last tches oh that is fantastic you've got this done since this morning yeah that's amazing is it beautiful the time team logo on the back I mean it's it's amazed me how many people it's taken to produce just this one vessel yes once the vase has had its final fire it'll go on display at Ceramica the new Exhibition Center to be built on our site this is where your base is this is where my building is we might have a problem oh right so but the layout of the new building will be amended to feature some of the archaeology discovered over the last 3 days finally just enough time to let the people of buram see what we found well it's been pretty hectic today hasn't it and unfortunately 's run out on us but the good news from trench 2 is that underneath this 19th century Kil we've got this tiny little bit of original Factory floor which Josiah Wedgewood himself would have walked on and quite extraordinarily all these people have stayed with us through three days of wind and rain and given that we thought that the meat market would have cut through all the evidence that we've been looking for we think we've done pretty well over the last three days don't we [Music] [Music] [Music] 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Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

Views: 355,867

Keywords: time, team, full, episodes, season

Id: 9mD67s1ukhk

Length: 47min 0sec (2820 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2013