![]() The project’s principal aim was to provide a ‘one stop shop’ where the most useful resources for identifying pipes could be made available for other researchers, together with guidelines for dealing with pipes archaeologically. In order to make key elements of the reserve collections more accessible, Historic England funded a digitisation project. ![]() The Archive has a publicly accessible display in the Victoria Gallery and Museum at the university, but the majority of its holdings are in reserve collections, which are available by appointment. The artefactual record comprises both the results of formal excavations, such as those on pipe kiln sites from Lincolnshire and Herefordshire, as well as fieldwalking and other pipe collections. Regional groups of seventeenth and eighteenth century pipes from across England are well represented as are collections of decorative nineteenth-century bowls. Larger paper archives, such as Adrian Oswald’s original notes, excavation records or the company paperwork from Pollock’s, the last commercial pipemaking firm, are accessioned and stored separately, as are books. Each site file is accessioned and any printed works added to a bibliography of the Archive’s holdings. Where possible, notes, photos and offprints are filed on a geographical basis by country, county and then site. The paper archive includes primary unpublished notes and company records as well as printed books and articles. Similarly, the abolitionist movement of the early nineteenth century resulted in anti-slavery pipes.Īfter nearly a quarter of a century Liverpool has remained the centre for research in this field and the Archive has grown to become a unique resource that holds an unparalleled range of material relating to the pipemaking industry.Īt its most basic level the Archive’s holdings can be divided into paper and artefactual material. Allegiance to the crown could be demonstrated during the seventeenth century by pipes featuring the king while late eighteenth ideals were embodied in the Masonic pipes of that period. As well as providing an accurate dating tool, their decoration can also allow broader social interpretation. With the continued growth of interest in all facets of our recent archaeological past (historical, industrial, colonial, military, etc.), pipes have retained their importance as a key artefact type. As a result of their work, clay pipes have become perhaps the most useful tool for dating and interpreting archaeological deposits dating from the late sixteenth century onwards. ![]() ![]() They dominated the field from the 1950s until the 1970s, establishing regional and national bowl form typologies, compiling lists of makers and publishing numerous papers on the subject. Not only were they ubiquitous and used at all levels of society but they were also very short lived and could be accurately dated and sourced.Īlthough there had been several previous studies, it was Adrian Oswald while at the Guildhall Museum (and later a curator at Birmingham Museum) and David Atkinson, a London headmaster and amateur archaeologist, that laid the foundations for systematic modern pipe research. It also became evident that archaeological techniques could be applied to more recent sites with clay tobacco pipes becoming the ‘type fossil’ for the Post-Medieval period. Following the Second World War there was a growing realisation that evidence for our recent past was being swept away without any record.
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