Oceans Odyssey 4. Pottery from the Tortugas Shipwreck, Straits of Florida: A Merchant Vessel from Spain's 1622 Tierra Firme Fleet (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781782977100)

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.

Author: Greg Stemm,Ellen Gerth
ISBN-10: 1782977104
ISBN-13: 9781782977100
Publisher: Oxbow Books Limited
Language: English
Published: 07/31/2014
Pages: 280
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 3.04lbs
Size: 11.20h x 9.05w x 0.82d