Rose Head Nail (Archaeological Find)

Files

Here we can see the remnant of a small, used rose-head nail, bent out of shape from being pounded into the hard, native woods of New England.
Here we see various types of hand-forged nails; each with their own shape and purpose, all hand-wrought by skilled smiths. Boxed in red is a small rose head nail like the one found in Harvard Yard.
Pictured here is a woman forging at an anvil. This print, from the English Holkham Bible, dates to the early 14th century, and shows the little-known persistence of women in the forge, a societal position usually associated with towering, muscular men.

Title:

Rose Head Nail

Subject:

It is the mid-18th century, and hammers ring across the West Midlands, striking hot sparks from rods of black iron. 50,000 men fan flames that burn white-hot, bringing lumps of ore to temperatures high enough scorch skin from bone and turn wood to ash. These smiths don’t forge swords and spears, the shoes for horses, or the wrought iron engines of war. They are nailers—specialized makers of pointed metal rods that hold the world together. Artisans of peace and construction of new homes. If each smith makes 2,000 nails per day, total production approaches 100,000,000 daily (Shwartz)—scores of them destined for the colonies, where they will tack shingles to new houses, shoes to draft animals, and a myriad of other chunks of New England hardwood in place for years to come. Some nails even made it to Harvard, where they held together the hallowed halls of the, now gone, Old College.

Nails were—and are—an integral part of human construction, allowing colonists to erect buildings more swiftly and with less carpentry-related skill than homes built with earlier mortise-and-tenon construction. Nevertheless, the collective time and work required to sustain the colonies’ demand for nails is staggering—particularly when we imagine smiths pounding each nail into its four-sided tapered-rod shape individually, by hand, then separately “heading” each with another disk of forged metal (Nelson). Some nails we call “rose heads” for their four-faceted heads, reminiscent of the blooming petals of a rose—a traditionally feminine motif that is surprisingly fitting, when we consider accounts of master smiths in the Midlands region:

“I observed one, or more females…. wielding the hammer with all the grace of their sex. The beauties of their face were rather eclipsed by the smut of the anvil; …. Struck with the novelty, I inquired, “Whether the ladies in this country shod horses?” but was answered, with a smile, “They are nailers” (Shwartz).

Creator:

Jack Smith

Source:

Works Cited

Markewitz, Darrell. "Hammered Out Bits." 'Proof' (??) of Female Blacksmiths. N.p., 12 Jan. 2011. Web. 03 May 2017. <http://warehamforgeblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/proof-of-female-blacksmiths.html>.

Nelson, Lee H. "Nail Chronology." (n.d.): n. pag. Umwblogs.org. Web. 3 May 2017. <http://files.umwblogs.org/blogs.dir/7608/files/nail_chronology.pdf>.

Schwarz, Kenneth. "The Nail Market During the Colonial Period." Making History. N.p., 28 June 2011. Web. 03 May 2017. <http://makinghistorynow.com/2011/06/the-nail-market-during-the-colonial-period/>.

Object Name:

Rose Head Nail

Inventory Description:

Small nail, seems to have a faintly four-faceted head that has been pounded indicating it is a rose head nail. No detectable burrs on the body of the nail indicate it is not a cut nail, but a nail that was hand-forged.

Peabody Number:

2016.29.1483

Intrasite:

H943, level 4

Depth:

60-70cm

Class 1:

Metal

Class 2:

Hardware

Class 3:

nail

Quantity:

1

Height (cm):

1.5cm

Width (cm):

0.1

Depth/Thickness (cm):

0.1

Collection:

2017 Assignment 3

Tags:

,