Female Microhistorical Archaeology

2.1 Running a Fishery

In 1663, James Yonge sailed to Newfoundland as a surgeon on board a ship. During his many months there he visited several parts of the colony, engaging with its inhabitants and activities. In his diary he wrote that he would “forbear to describe the harbours because the maps I shall draw of them will do that sufficient” (Poynter, 1963, p. 56), presenting a map of part of the coast of Newfoundland. What is most extraordinary about this territorial representation is that he does not register any plantation owner’s name, except for one. In Ferryland he wrote on his map Lady Kirke, referring to Sara Kirke, one of the most prominent inhabitants of the Avalon Peninsula at that time.

We do not know if James Yonge ever met Sarah Kirke, but she must have been an extraordinary woman in a time when extraordinary women were seldom recognised. The few things we know about Sarah Kirke reveal a remarkable character. She arrived in Ferryland in 1638 together with her husband, Sir David, and around 100 settlers, replacing Lord Calvert who had moved south to found Saint Mary City. A royal charter granted the Kirke family a legal right to explore and impose taxes on all non-English ships that explored Newfoundland waters (Matthews, 1975, pp. 104–111). The decision to base their home in Ferryland may well have been due to the site having the necessary land and harbour infrastructures to settle if one wanted to control the colony. “The extant dwellings, stone quay, waterfront storehouse, and fisheries infrastructure allowed Sir David to implement his plans without having to invest large amounts of money or time” (Gaulton & Casimiro, 2014, p. 6). In the decade after the Kirke family settled, the settlement enjoyed significant economic growth, which reflected archaeologically in the material culture and features discovered in the twentieth century (Gaulton & Tuck, 2003). But, in the early 1650s, there was a turn in events. In 1651, Sir David, an assumed royalist, was forced to return to London, summoned by the Commonwealth to report on his activities in Newfoundland. He never returned from his voyage and died in prison in 1654. There is more to his story but in Sara’s story, she and her four sons remained at Ferryland, and in 1660, she wrote to King Charles II asking to extend her husband’s rights to explore Newfoundland to her older son George (Pope, 1993, p. 91). This request never received a reply, and although she agreed to pay rent to Lord Baltimore (the colony’s governor) (Pope, 1993, pp. 92–93), she assumed the direction of Ferryland’s Pool plantation destinies. Lady Sara decided never to remarry nor return to England and continued to rule her own life. News from 1673 mentions that the people with the highest economic impact in Ferryland were Sara Kirke, her sons George, Philip, David, and Jarvis, and, although we do not know much about her, Sara’s sister Lady Frances Hopkins (Pope, 1993, pp. 110–111). These two women were successful business owners during the 1670s in a male-dominated fishing industry. “In 1675, for example, Lady Kirke employed 25 men and owned five boats whereas her sister had 15 and 3, respectively” (Gaulton & Casimiro, 2014, p. 6). Lady Sara died some years later and her property passed to her sons (Pope, 1993, p. 188). Several seasons of excavations at the site unearthed the house where Sara lived and the house where her sons later dwelt. Historically speaking there is not that much we know about Sara, but archaeology permitted us to know her better.

In 2010, I visited Newfoundland for the first time with the purpose of comprehending the enormous amounts of Portuguese faience found at Ferryland (Gaulton & Tuck, 2003) and the direct relation it had with Portugal (Casimiro, 2016). At that time, I discovered that Lady Sara was using a personalised set of Portuguese faience marked with her initials S.K., together with huge amounts of other objects produced in many parts of the world (Figure 1). These ego-artefacts were found in association with a stone-framed building, close to the water, where it is believed that Sarah Kirke lived and from where she could control the harbour (Gaulton, 2006). The S.K. bowls, like other objects within the house, did not present any wear marks, which indicates that these were likely to be identity objects that she perhaps either displayed or used on special occasions.

Figure 1

One of the S.K. bowls found in Sara Kirke’s house (photo by T. M. Casimiro) – courtesy Colony of Avalon.

If documents permit reconstruction of the events of Sara’s life, archaeology permits us to enhance our knowledge of her daily activities. We know she had economic capacity for acquiring goods that were exotic and exquisite, but she also had “custom-made” ceramics with her initials. We suspect that her sister, another prominent woman in Ferryland, also did the same, due to the recovery of a bowl with an H. at the bottom. These objects not only marked ownership of their things and their home but also their identification in the house later occupied by her sons, reusing or keeping these objects as heirlooms, reveals that they were a reflection of her own identity (Gaulton & Casimiro, 2014). She ate from the English plates, where she may have had peas and beans, and pork, since those bones were found on site and we know they were sent as cargo to Newfoundland (Bain & Prévost, 2010; Casimiro, 2013; Guiry, Noël, Tourigny, & Grimes, 2012). Misha Ewen posited that this consumer characteristic of Sara Kirke’s personality reflected a “desire to self-fashion an English cosmopolitan identity and thus strengthen her family’s status at the imperial frontier” (Ewen, 2021, p. 24). While this may be so, it is my belief that this consumption of objects was far more than the desire of a woman to belong to an imperial macrostructure. She had the choice of remarrying, she had the choice to return to England after 1660, but she decided to stay in a freezing land, where she could control her own destiny. Sara’s outstanding ceramic collection may have reflected an aesthetic concept of globalisation but was only appreciated by a few. Maybe James Yonge actually entered her house and saw the Portuguese red wares on the same shelves as the English, Dutch, and Portuguese tin glaze and the Chinese porcelain, but it did not impress him enough to write anything about it. Sara and her family lived in a house where they could use and appreciate ceramics produced in many parts of the world, where they enjoyed commodities whose consumption was possible owing to a globalised world. They drank coffee sweetened with sugar, smoked tobacco, and ate oranges, all from Chinese, English, Dutch, and Portuguese cups, plates, and pipes (Gaulton, 2006).

Sara’s micronarrative demonstrates how archaeology can add to the knowledge of a woman who fought structures by refusing to return to England and living a comfortable life among her peers. Documental information tells us who she and her family were but not how they lived their daily lives and the things they used. Her story contributed to the general understanding of how a woman could defy the rules established for women in colonial settings.

2.2 Pledging for a Divorce

The story of Katherine Nany Naylor is better known (Cook, 1998). Katherine was born in 1630 in England to Reverend John Wheelwright and Marie Storey. In late 1631, after her mother died, her father remarried to Mary Hutchinson. In 1635, Katherine and her family moved to Boston, Massachusetts. After a series of events related to trials and accusations, the family moved to Exeter in what is today New Hampshire, and later to Maine, only to return to New Hampshire a few years later. Here, Katherine met her first husband, Robert Nany, also born in England. They got married sometime between 1645 and 1653 and moved to Boston, where they “purchased land, a dwelling house, and a wharf along Ann Street on the north side of Boston Harbor,” prospering as a merchant family (Cook, 1998, p. 16). She had eight children with her first husband, although only two reached adulthood. Robert died in 1663, leaving his property to Katherine. Two or three years after becoming a widow, Katherine married Edward Naylor, also an Englishman, with whom she conceived two children who survived. Edward was an abusive husband and in 1671 Katherine petitioned against him to the Supreme Court, accusing him of violence against everyone in their household, trying to poison her, and adultery by impregnating one of the house servants. Katherine was allowed to divorce her husband and continued to live in the property with her four children. She never remarried and died of old age in 1716. Katherine lived in a Puritan community. The fact that her husband threatened her children and her own safety meant it was probably widely assumed that she was a failure as a wife (Cook, 1998).

Sometime during her final years in her Boston house (she moved to Charlestown in 1700) a privy started to be filled with household waste. Consequently, during the 1992 excavation, it was possible to infer several things about the house where Katherine lived with her family. Although we know a lot about Katherine’s life, if it were not for archaeology we would never know what kind of food her family ate at that time, what clothing they used, what tableware they ate from, and even that her home floor had to be replaced at some point after 1660, with new wood planks (Bain, 1998). Archaeological discoveries reveal it was a wealthy household which probably imported food, ceramics, and glass from several European countries, including the Portuguese objects I study, but also South American ceramics from Mexico and expensive silk clothes (Figure 2).

Figure 2

A Portuguese faience box found in Katherine Naylor’s privy (photo by T. M. Casimiro) – courtesy City of Boston Archaeology.

There was no lack of food in the house, with the discovery of considerable amounts of wheat, barley, oats, and rye (Kelso, 1998), plums, cherries, peaches, pumpkins, grapes, olives, pears and apples, hawthorns, brambles, elderberries, blueberries, huckleberries, and strawberries. Food was eaten seasoned, with the discovery of pepper grains and coriander, but also walnuts and hickories. Other plants included lambsquarters, pokeweeds, mustard, and wild carrots, among others (Dudek et al., 1998). The animal bones found in the privy also suggest that the family consumed beef (domestic cow), lamb (sheep/goat), and pork (domestic pig), as well as wild mammals, wild birds, domestic birds, and a small amount of fish (Brown & Bowen, 1998).

However, the state of conservation of the privy’s residues also permitted recognition of the existence of parasites that would have lived in the household inhabitants’ intestines, revealing that life may not have been that comfortable (Driscoll, 1995). Inside the privy large quantities of shoes and silk garments were also found, something which was only allowed for those whose estates were valued above £200 and which, considering the material culture found, was clearly the case in Katherine’s household (Ordoñez & Walters, 1998). Archaeology thus permitted deeper knowledge of her daily activities and her personal life.

In the excavation of Katherine’s privy, there was no object where her name was engraved; however, all the other objects were from the personal use of her household. She could have worn one of those shoes and those fine silk adornments could have been part of her dress. If not for her it was most likely one of her children or maids. This does not make these artefacts less biographical since they are fundamental in understanding the daily habits of this family and how they differed from or confirmed a colonial lifestyle.

2.3 Resisting the Rules

The excavation of Portuguese female religious houses, especially those occupied during the seventeenth century, reveals the existence of hundreds of ego-artefacts in the shape of plates with the names and initials of the women who inhabited those convents and monasteries. These religious houses are spread across the country, such as – to name a few that have been excavated in recent decades – the Santana Convent in Lisbon (Gomes et al., 2013), the Jesus Convent in Setúbal (Almeida, 2012), the Santana Convent in Leiria (Trindade, 2013), the Aracoelli Convent in Alcácer do Sal (Parreira, 2020), the Francesinhas Convent in Lisbon, and the Santa Clara a Velha monastery in Coimbra, among many others. These religious houses, within which dozens of nuns lived their daily lives, reveal a different life from that expected from them. For the purpose of this article, I am going to refer just to two of those religious houses: the Santa a Clara a Velha (Coimbra) and the Nossa Senhora de Aracoelli (Alcácer do Sal).

The monastery of Santa Clara a Velha is located on the southern bank of the Mondego River in Coimbra and is directly associated with one of Portugal’s most famous queens, Isabel of Aragon, wife of King Dinis. The history of this site has a direct connection with the Mondego River: from its early years, the site was constantly flooded by the river owing to the silting process (Côrte-Real, Santos, Mourão, & Macedo, 2002, p. 24). This rough relationship resulted in severe damage to the building and a tough life for the nuns, and the river’s unpredictable behaviour was fundamental to the life, evolution, and fate of the site. After the extinction of the first monastery in 1311, which had been founded in 1286, Queen Isabel of Aragon paid for the construction of the new building. This was built in the same place and its purpose was to house a community of Saint Claire nuns. During the centuries it was occupied, there are several references to floods and the attempts made to address them, such as the elevation of the monastery’s ground floor, an endeavour that can be observed in the archaeological record. The deterioration of living conditions ultimately led to the abandonment of the site. In 1677, the nuns moved to a new monastery located uphill and far from the river’s direct influence. The lower part of the monastery was covered by garbage and mud until 1995, when the excavation started (Côrte-Real et al., 2002). The excavation led to the recovery of a huge range of artefacts representing the daily lives of the nuns. Ceramics were, as expected, the most abundant category of material culture, but the archaeologists also found glass, and several small items related to religious and personal activities (Casimiro, Silva, & Leal, 2023; Leal & Ferreira, 2018; Leal & Santos, 2022).

Among the thousands of ceramic objects identified, there are plates and bowls with the names of the nuns that lived in the convent. These objects present wear marks at the bottom and on the rim, revealing, contrary to what was noticed about the S.K. bowls owned by Sara Kirke, that these were objects used for everyday activities. These plates belonged to Elena Baptista, Francisca Moura, Maria da Encarnação, Soror Mariana de Cristo, Ascensão, and Marinha, among many others (Figure 3).

Figure 3

Portuguese faience plate with the female name “MARINHA” found in Santa Clara a Velha (photo by R. Silva) – courtesy Santa Clara a Velha Museum.

Some of these without the woman’s name on the front of the plate have the family name on the reverse, also working as an identification mark. Family was one of the most important social structures in Ealy Modern Portugal (Hespanha, 1993) and these objects may have been donated by relatives and used as distinctive marks inside the monastery (Figure 4).

Figure 4

Portuguese faience bowl with the family name “MASEDO” (photo by J. L. Sequeira) – courtesy Santa Clara a Velha Museum.

The convent of Nossa Senhora de Aracoelli was founded above the ruins of one of the headquarters of the Saint James order in Alcácer do Sal. In the sixteenth century, Rui Salema and Dona Catarina Sotto Mayor Salema (husband and wife) asked that the old buildings inside the medieval castle be given to them, with the intention of building a female Franciscan convent commanded by the St. Clare’s order (Parreira, 2020). In 1561, authorisation for the construction of the convent was granted so 33 nuns would call this religious house their new home. Not much is known about the history of the convent in the seventeenth century; however, in 1792, the Mother Superior wrote to the Queen informing her that only 13 religious women lived in the convent and asking for permission to accept another 12 nuns. In 1834, the general extinction of all religious orders in Portugal regulated that female convents could not accept any more nuns and would have to close after the last nun perished. In the case of Nossa Senhora de Aracoeli, this happened in 1874 with the death of Soror Maria da Conceição de São José (Parreira, 2020). In the early 1990s, a project for the recovery of the castle and convent promoted the excavation of the convent area, where, besides the architectural features, thousands of objects were recovered. Although the majority of these are yet to be studied, a large portion of the Portuguese tin glaze wares have been analysed. Contrary to Santa Clara, plates with the names of nuns are rare and it was only possible to identify the names of Abbess Trindade, Teresa Anunciada, and Elisia da Gloria. However, a considerable number of these objects were marked by the nuns with their own initials, or some personal mark such as crosses and squares (Parreira, Sousa, & Fragoso, 2020) (Figure 5). These marks are frequently found in Portuguese tin glaze ware objects; however, this convent was the first time where this practice was observed almost as a generalised behaviour for distinguishing objects within what we could consider a collective household. These ego-artefacts tell us that the nuns were not eating from any given plate or bowl but were careful enough to mark their plates and not share food.

Figure 5

Marked ceramics used by the nuns in Nossa Senhora de Aracoelli convent (photo by C. Parreira) – courtesy Alcácer do Sal Municipality.

The majority of women who lived in Portuguese convents did not enrol owing to their call but owing to family obligations. When an advantageous marriage was not possible the convent or monastery was the most plausible option. The archaeological record reveals that these women, although separated from society, were not living the lives a nun was supposed to live – the material culture and food remains found in convents reveal a wealthy lifestyle, comparable or even superior to what was found in palaces (Santos, Casimiro, & Castro, 2023). Almost all these convents yield several objects with the names of the nuns depicted on them, demonstrating that they were private objects, used by specific women, personal items that own their own narrative. It takes a substantial effort – sometimes in vain – to discover who these women were, as they are otherwise historically unattested. Thus far, it has not been possible to know anything about their lives before they enrolled in the convent.

There are even some historians who claim that these women obtained an elevated degree of freedom when compared with non-religious women: for example, since they did not suffer the pressures of marriage or the sexuality men imposed upon them, many of them developed sexual manifestations with their female convent cohabitants (Braga, 2008; Silva, 2019). We do not know where these women were born, how old they were, or the names of their relatives. We know their names because they were written on plates used for their service in the religious house where they lived, along with other archaeological evidence, namely zooarchaeological analysis which could tell us that women in Santa a Clara named Marinha, Maria da Encarnação, or Elena Baptista, who lived there between 1660 and 1677, ate dishes made of lamb and a lot of chicken eggs from plates originating as far away as China (Casimiro, Silva, & Leal, 2023; Moreno-García & Detry, 2010).

The archaeology and historical analyses of female convents and monasteries are yet taking their first steps in Portugal (Gomes, 2012); however, this is probably one of the best examples not only to discuss female microhistorical archaeology but also the relationship between written and archaeological documentary evidence related to these religious houses. There is not one single example of which I am aware that we do not have historical accounts about their foundation and patronage or the order all these religious houses, and the people who lived in them, obeyed to. Thinking in terms of macrostructures these are of fundamental importance to reconstruct the micronarratives of the women who dwelt there, thus we can, at least for the historical archaeology of religious houses sustain that it would be complicated, to do the archaeology analysis of these spaces without the historical analysis.