Oceans Odyssey 4. Pottery from the Tortugas Shipwreck, Straits of Florida: A Merchant Vessel from Spain’s 1622 Tierra Firme Fleet
Greg Stemm (Editor); Sean Kingsley (Editor); Ellen Gerth (Author)
Hardback, 280 pp. Richly illustrated. 2014 Oxbow Books
The Tortugas shipwreck excavated at a depth of 405 meters in the Straits of Florida contained a major collection of 3,800 intact and fragmentary olive jars, tablewares, cooking vessels and tobacco pipes. Identified as the Portuguese-built and Spanish-operated 117-ton Buen Jesús y Nuestra Señora del Rosario, the ship’s Seville dominated tablewares are a revealing index of unchanged cultural tastes and continued production at the end of Spain’s Golden Age. For cooking the crew relied on Afro-Caribbean colonoware, possibly the first recorded archaeological evidence of maritime slavery in the Americas fleets. Two tin-glazed plates painted with papal coat of arms – the Keys of Heaven and triple crown – may have been used by Spain-bound clergymen from the newly formed Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith. Samples of all ceramics were subjected to Inductively-Coupled Plasma Spectrometry (ICPS) analysis to determine vessel origins.
Six chapters focus on the tablewares, tin-glazed papal plates, Afro-Caribbean cooking wares, the olive jars, Inductively-Coupled Plasma Spectrometry results, and a study of how the pottery reflects Spanish colonial economic models, also compared to Roman and medieval structures.
Table of Content:
- Preface by Ivor Noël Hume
- Introduction by Greg Stemm & Sean A. Kingsley
1. The Deep-Sea Tortugas Shipwreck, Florida (1622):
The Ceramic Tablewares, Sean A. Kingsley
2. Papal Plates & Propaganda on the Deep-Sea
Tortugas Shipwreck, Florida (1622) Sean A. Kingsley
3. Spanish Olive Jars from the Tortugas Shipwreck, Florida (1622)S.A. Kingsley, J. Flow,
Ellen Gerth & Claudio Lozano Guerra-Librero
4. The Deep-Sea Tortugas Shipwreck, Florida (1622):
Afro-Caribbean Colonoware & Maritime Slavery: Ellen Gerth & Sean A. Kingsley
5. Chemical Analysis of Pottery from the Tortugas
Shipwreck (1622) by Plasma Spectrometry (ICPS): Michael J. Hughes
6. Clay Tobacco Pipes from the Tortugas Shipwreck, Florida (1622): J.B. Sudbury, E. Gerth
7. Rome in Spain, Spain in the Americas:
Amphoras, Olive Jars & the Economics of Long-Distance Trade:S.Kingsley, M. Decker