Spanish Olive Jar and other shipping containers of sixteenth-century Florida: quantifying the documentary record

ABSTRACT

Spanish Olive Jar is a ubiquitous marker of the Spanish colonial period in the southeastern United States, appearing on both terrestrial and maritime sites where colonists resided and traveled between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Olive Jar ceramic type has been the subject of many archaeological studies, most of which use vessel shape typologies and rim morphology to aid in the chronological placement of sites and proveniences where they are found, and more recently also using compositional analyses to determine locations of manufacture. Frequently lacking, however, is anything more than a cursory generic reference to what these vessels were likely to have originally contained, and how exactly they were used and reused by the people who lived and worked at the archaeological sites where their remains are so commonly found. The intent of this article is to explore primary source documents that provide quantifiable data to answer such questions, with the goal of enhancing the utility of Spanish Olive Jar for archaeological interpretation by situating it within its broader functional context as one of a number of different types of shipping containers used and reused in a variety of circumstances during the Spanish colonial period.

KEYWORDS:

• Olive jar
• archaeological ceramics
• Spanish Florida
• Spanish colonial period
• quantitative history
• maritime history

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the many teachers, colleagues, and students with whom I have engaged in discussions about Olive Jar over the many decades that I have been involved in Spanish colonial archaeology and history, but with regard to this article in particular, I would especially like to thank UWF graduate students Caroline Peacock and Emily McMillon, whose individual thesis research involving Olive Jar at the Luna Settlement and Emanuel Point sites prompted many productive conversations that ultimately led me in the direction of this document-focused study. In fact, part of the reason for writing this article was to compile and distill relevant aspects of my own long-term documentary research into Spanish material culture so that Caroline would be able to make use of it for her thesis on Olive Jar, which explains why the preliminary draft of this article is cited in her 2023 thesis, and I also cite her completed thesis in this final version. I am also grateful to UWF graduate student Kate Ganas for the many in-depth discussions during collaborative documentary research into the provisioning of sixteenth-century Spanish ships, which also resulted in new discoveries and understandings. Additionally, I would like to thank the reviewers for this article, whose suggestions and additional sources definitely helped improve the final product.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data used for the present analysis were drawn from primary source documents at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain, most of which are either contained within the John E. Worth Collection at the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History in Gainesville or are available online at the Portal de Archivos Españolas (PARES).

Notes

1 A word on nomenclature is instructive here. Even though William Henry Holmes seems to have derived the term “Spanish olive jar” as a simple descriptor for “earthen jars of this class” in reference to ceramic vessels that he interpreted were used “to ship olives to America” (Holmes 1903:130), John Goggin’s later foundational work on these vessels explored various possible historical designations and name correspondences before concluding that “it seems best to use the term olive jar as the equivalent to a “type name” with no local ethnographic or linguistic significance” (Goggin 1960:3–5). Unfortunately, because of its structure, the name “olive jar” has subsequently been used by archaeologists both as a formal type name (e.g., “olive jar”) and as a two-word descriptor for the individual vessels themselves (e.g., “olive jars”). In other words, from a grammatical standpoint, archaeologists have generally been very inconsistent about usage of the term, such as using “the olive jar” both as a mass noun and in reference to a single vessel, sometimes with or without articles, and sometimes in plural. In addition, even though many other archaeological ceramic types are defined principally by ceramic paste and surface treatment, and may occur on a range of vessel forms, Olive Jar is instead defined as a type principally by a single distinctive vessel form (with relatively minor variation in both shape and size) when combined with a specific ceramic paste and range of surface treatments (glazed and unglazed). In fact, the paste and surface treatments characteristic of Olive Jar are also found in other vessel forms, but these fall within other ceramic type names, such as Spanish Storage Jar (e.g., Deagan 1987:36–37). Beyond this, Goggin’s blending of the cantimplora and botija vessel forms into his original definition of “Early Style Olive Jar” (see below) adds yet another ceramic vessel type to those with the same ceramic paste and surface treatments. For all these reasons, following Goggin’s original suggestion, in this paper Olive Jar will be used solely as a type name, and will be capitalized as a proper name for an archaeological ceramic type, and it will not be used in the plural as if referring to multiple individual jars with the adjective “olive.” The capitalized, singular type name will be used in reference to sherds (Olive Jar sherds), whole vessels (Olive Jar vessels), and as a type or class of ceramic (Olive Jar).