Olive Jar

1500-1575

Name(s) currently unknown

Santo Domingo, DOM (find site); Gainesville, FL, USA, Florida Museum of Natural History (current location)

Large jars like this one were originally used to ship olives and olive oil from Spain to the Americas. Their diffusion into houses of different classes, and into both Spanish and English colonies, suggests the porousness of social and political boundaries for certain kinds of material and visual culture.

Filled with heavy oil, the jar added ballast to a vessel during the trans-Atlantic voyage. The ship’s hold would contain a layer of sand and jars would be set into it, allowing them to shift as the ship moved without toppling or breaking. The rounded shape and handles of this jar mark it as an early example, By the 1580s, oblong jars were more common.

Jars like this one were once produced by the thousands in Spanish pottery workshops. Such workshops still exist, although pottery storage vessels have been superceded by modern plastics.

Made in Spain of clay, shaped upon a potter’s wheel and kiln-fired, such jars were reused in Spanish America.

In kitchens and pantries, olive jars served as storage vessels. If they broke, they were often recycled: archeologists have found such jars in roofs and used as filler in walls. And although olive jars were everyday wares, the wills of wealthy people list these vessels, sometimes by the dozens, among the worldly possessions to be passed onto heirs.

This olive jar was excavated from a shipwreck in Santo Domingo, but Spanish-style olive jars have also been found in 18th-century Virginia, suggesting that the traffic in these daily objects was not checked by the borders between English and Spanish colonies.

Reproduced courtesy of the Historical Archaeology College of the Florida Museum of Natural History

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Deagan, Kathleen. 1987. Artifacts of the Spanish colonies of Florida and the Caribbean, 1500-1800. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Marken, Mitchell W. 1994. Pottery from Spanish Shipwrecks. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.