While living at Ferry Farm, Mary Washington, mother of George, owned a creamware punch bowl with beautiful hand-painted enamel depicting a floral motif and cherry accents.  Archaeologists excavated pieces of this bowl from the cellar of the Washington home and subsequently discovered glue residue on the sherds.

We’ve written about the importance of the bowl’s discovery here and even showed how we recreated a glue similar to the one used to repair the bowl here.

As part of our continuing efforts to learn as much as we can about the punch bowl and these glue residues, we took the sherds to the archaeology lab at Dovetail Cultural Resource Group here in Fredericksburg, where they took photos using a microscope.

A microscopic view of the glue residue on the bowl that reveals brush strokes from when the glue was applied.

More glue.

In addition to closer views of the glue, these photos show dark flecks of iron in the red paint and reveal that iron was, in part, used to create the red pigment.

Whatever was used to create the yellow pigment could be ground up more finely than the iron in the red.

The microscopic view even revealed the brush strokes made by the artist who hand pained the decoration onto the bowl.

Mara Kaktins, Archaeologist
Ceramics & Glass Specialist

Zac Cunningham
Manager of Educational Programs