Testing the New World: early modern chemistry and mineral prospection at colonial Jamestown, 1607–1610

Abstract

The paper presents new research on an assemblage of metallurgical crucibles used in the assay of minerals at colonial Jamestown. The aim of the study is to explore the range of chemical operations carried out at the site of the first permanent British settlement in America, for which little is known in the documents. The results show that the colonists used high-quality Hessian crucibles to perform tests on different types of complex polymetallic sulphides. This was done to (1) prospect for potential silver and copper ores and (2) to find suitable sources of zinc and tin to be alloyed into brass and bronze through cementation with imported copper offcuts. This study makes a relevant contribution to the growing field of the archaeology of early chemistry and mineral prospection as well as the archaeology of early European colonies in the New World. In particular, material culture can shed fresh light on how European settlers reacted to the many challenges of a new and unfamiliar natural environment and how they tried to make sense and exploit it for financial profit.

Refining silver at the castle: the rare case of a large early modern cupel from Middelburg-in-Flanders, Belgium

“…(Rehren 1998;Martinón-Torres and Rehren 2005), in a seventeenthto eighteenth-century laboratory assemblage at Kapfenberg in Austria combined with the remains of an assay furnace (Mongiatti 2009: 266), with early sixteenth-century furnace remains at the mint of the Tower of London (White 2010), or at Cripplegate (sixteenth-seventeenth century), also in London, but whose context of use is not known (Bayley 2008: 138). Other discoveries should be mentioned, such as those of the Kutnà Hora mine (Bartoš et al 2001), at Montbéliard in a possible context of ore testing (Thomas et al 2006;Martinón-Torres et al 2008) or at colonial Jamestown in America (Veronesi et al 2019), and in the context of coin production in Paris (Thomas 2017), Nantes (Thomas 2014) and La Rochelle (Guirardo and Téreygeol 2011) in France. Most of the cited cupels are small in size (Fig.…”

Examining the Seventeenth-Century Copper Trade: An Analysis of Smelted Copper from Sites in Virginia and North Carolina

“…The planners also tasked the colonists with finding new zinc-rich sources of calamite stone for the production of brass. A large amount of metallurgical equipment has been recovered from Jamestown, and its analysis shows that these early experiments were unsuccessful in locating new deposits (Martinón-Torres and Rehren 2007;Veronesi et al 2019). John Smith's 1624 account of the Jamestown expedition (Barbour 1986; Smith 1624) offers insights into the role of copper in Powhatan-English interactions (see also Mallios 1998Mallios , 2006Mallios and Emmett 2004).…”

“…The planners also tasked the colonists with finding new zinc-rich sources of calamite stone for the production of brass. A large amount of metallurgical equipment has been recovered from Jamestown, and its analysis shows that these early experiments were unsuccessful in locating new deposits (Martinón-Torres and Rehren 2007; Veronesi et al 2019).…”