Curator's Choice |
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June 2010 It’s All in the Details - By: Nancy S. Shippen, Often overlooked today as an insignificant detail on a jacket, shirt or pair of pants, buttons can hold important information for archaeologists and historians, even raise questions about context and meaning on an archaeology site. The buttons of military uniforms can reveal information about the armies involved, as well as the dates and use of a site. In the early 18th century, the increase in the number of armies in Europe necessitated the assignment of numerical designations to regiments. The French first applied those numbers to their uniform buttons in 1762 followed by the British and the Americans (Troiani, 2001: xi). Excavations at the Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania have recovered four pewter regimental buttons from the Revolutionary War (the winter of 1777-1778). Three of the buttons are from the 2nd Pennsylvania Regiment and one button is from the 14th Continental Regiment. These buttons have been conserved at the MAC Lab (Figure 1-3).
Most military buttons on the uniforms of enlisted personnel in the American Revolution were cast of a tin/lead alloy (pewter). Groups of up to twelve buttons could be cast in molds made of brass, bronze or wood (Tice, 1997: 2). The 2nd PA Regimental buttons from the Valley Forge excavation are one-piece cast pewter with a recessed center and raised numeral, integral looped shank and a scissors-type mold mark (Figures 4-6). While the backs of the recovered buttons are too corroded to determine if they are marked (Figure 3), most buttons from this regiment were back-marked with “Clarke” in raised letters, believed to refer to a Philadelphia button manufacturer, Ephraim Clarke of Clarke & Company (Troiani, 2001: 136). The button from the 14th Continental Regiment (Figure 7) was also cast pewter with a raised numeral “14” and without a border (Troiani, 2001: 93).
No fighting occurred at Valley Forge during the Revolutionary War. After the British captured Philadelphia, the patriot capital, and as winter approached, Washington withdrew the American troops to Valley Forge, close enough to maintain pressure on the British without the threat of a surprise attack. Supplies were not abundant but they were available as the soldiers patrolled, foraged and defended the camp. The soldiers became a well-trained professional army under the training of a former Prussian army officer, Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Augustus von Steuben. The soldiers at Valley Forge spent six months living active lives, waiting for the next move from the British (http://www.nps.gov/vafo/historyculture/index.htm). |
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