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The Rhenish Stoneware from the Monte Cristi Shipwreck, Dominican Republic
- Anne Wood Lessman
- Thesis: December 1997
- Chair: Hamilton
- Discovered in 1966 off the north coast of the Dominican Republic, the
Monte Cristi shipwreck represents the remains of an English-built ship
carrying a Dutch cargo that sank in Spanish waters during the mid-17th
century. Despite heavy salvage of the site by sport divers and
treasure hunters, significant features of the ship's construction and a
substantial sample of the ship's cargo have survived. This cargo was
predominantly composed of several types of clay tobacco smoking pipes,
although other diagnostic artifacts such as ceramics, trade goods, and
luxury imports have also been preserved. One artifact which has
appeared consistently throughout the excavation of the wreck is a ceramic
known as Rhenish stoneware, especially a type called Bartmannkruge
which was produced and exported from the town of Frechen, near Cologne,
during the 16th and 17th centuries. No complete stoneware vessels have
yet been found at Monte Cristi, but the mottled-brown salt-glazed fragments
are characterized by applied Bartmann faces and body medallions typical of
Rhenish stoneware from other 17th-century sites
Analyses of other artifacts from the Monte Cristi shipwreck have placed the
date of the wreck between 1652 and 1656 and the likely destination of the ship
to have been the northeastern seaboard of North America. In testing these
theories through a study of the Monte Cristi Rhenish stoneware, it has become
apparent that the assemblage probably dates to the 1650s or earlier and has
parallels at several sites in North America and on shipwreck sites around the
world. More valuable from an interpretive point of view is the actual size
of the stoneware assemblage, which suggests that the Rhenish stoneware was a
major element of the ship's cargo. Since the Dutch were the primary
transporters of Bartmannkruge in the 17th century, the stoneware's presence here
is a strong indication that the ship was under Dutch ownership at the time it
sank.
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