Raleigh 1 - the oak

Raleigh was named after Sir Walter and from the Olde English meaning oak forest. I had 2 productive days in downtown, firstly at the State archaeology office and secondly at the North Carolina Arts Council.
I had arranged to meet with Dr Billy Oliver and Thomas Beaman to look into whether there was any evidence of North Devon slipware in the State. Billy Oliver is an archaeologist and Research Centre Director at the office of State archaeology research Centre. He invited Tom Beaman to join us as Tom has spent a lot of time in Brunswick Town on the South East coast of NC. What was immediately interesting was that Tom and Billy talked about the graveyard of the Atlantic on the East coast, so called because of the many shipwrecks - this is the same as the North Devon coast, so there are parallels between the 2 places. It also helps to explain the lack of trade there as the ships would simply have been unable to stop and deliver goods for purchase.

After a bit of a history lesson Tom and Billy took me to see some sherds (pottery bits they told me are sherds and glass and other materials are shards) which have not been identified as being from North Devon but possibly could be. There were some very small sherds with green glaze and bag fulls of bigger pieces with browny black lead glaze. I was unable to identify those. There were also 4 or 5 pieces of sgraffito ware, again not identified as being North Devon slipware, but could be – I was able to photograph some of these to report back in Bideford to see if anyone might be able to throw light on their origin.

Tom very generously gave me a book about the archaeological finds from Brunswick town which contains information about the places where the sherds were found that I photographed – one being the public house and the other being from the Newman Kitchen and Prospect Hall at the site.