She Found A Bearded Man Half Buried In The Soil

When one gardens, soil is usually disturbed in one form or another. Anything from planting tulip bulbs in a single hole made with the implement designed for this purpose to raking to turning the soil over. When this happens sometimes the earth gives up "treasures"....long-lost bits of history.

I cannot tell you how many bits of 17th and 18th century pipes I have found in my lottie. Not only that, but also pottery bits and marbles.
A pipe bowl that I discovered:


Marbles (not my foto):


You see, we garden on what we call, "veen" ground. This area (outside) the city and adjacent to the place where criminals would be hung, was once marshes. When pottery or pipes would break, the people simply went out to the marshes and just flung them away.

This practice was widespread in the middle ages...probably in all countries and cultures. You may recall that my bride and I spend the spring months from april to late june walking fields doing migratory bird conservation. Some of the fields are grassy and others have been ploughed.

Whilst walking a ploughed field a few kilometers away from where we live, we were both deeply focused on looking for the almost un-seeable bird nests with their speckled eggs. Then-- "Blimey--what is this...I found a man buried in the soil"?!, she called out.

My concentration broke, I turned towards her and looked; with raised eyebrows, half expecting a skeletal foot or cranium sticking out of the ground. I stuck a tonkin stick into the soil to mark my place and walked over to her. She said that she had come upon a pottery chard. She stopped, bent over and retrieved the greyish, broken bit of pottery...turned it over and was not a little shocked and surprised to see a bearded man's face staring at her!

She stood there, the wind blowing across her hand...just mesmerized at the object filling her palm. I had a look and could see right away that it was not the sort of piece that we usually see in the fields and garden. She tucked it into her pocket, vowing to suss this out, once home.

Well, here is what it looks like, with a one euro coin for comparison:


Right then, so what do we have to go on?
--The fragment is man-worked stone/pottery
--The fragment has a very clear facial representation
--the colour is greyish with bleeding blue splotches
--the motif is not typical of pottery produced in the 20th or 21st Cent's
--the location

With this, my partner turned on the compi and the search was on. The searching and reading did not yield much. Many different terms were used. This went on for a while until she finally recalled somewhere, from way back in the far recesses of her mind, the word, "baardman".

This lead to some hits on google. Some images. She had the feeling that she was getting warm. There were some examples of similar faces;


...but, we noticed there were many different bearded faces, none quite looking like the one that she found. I do not know how many pictures she went through until she discovered a fragment closely resembling hers...only without the cobalt blue drips.

Here is a foto of a complete jug (not my foto):


Ok then, so it was then time to do some research to see if she could discover a date for this artefact, among other things. To make a long story short, it looked like the chard dated from ~1600-1650. It looks like we have a date (but this must be confirmed).

This portion of the search opened a whole list of further questions.

From whence cometh this bearded man jug?
The main area was Frechen, Germany. It would have been loaded onto the boat at the near-by trading centre of Keulen. Then disseminated north- and southwards on the Rhine River. An origin has been established.

Later, a few other towns began to copy and capitalize on the popularity of this jug sort, producing them themselves.

Now we also know the form of the pottery of which this artefact was a part. Boxes are being ticked.

What was the purpose of such a jug? From what we could gather, the jugs were primarily used to transport fluids. Beer, wine and mercury were the contents that kept coming up.
Interestingly, there is evidence indicating that other items were put into the jugs.
They were used in a witchcraft sort of way, whereby things such as hair, urine and other things were placed in them and used as an amulet for good luck, a protection or to cause bad things for a foe. It has also been recorded that folks would whisper a curse into the jug and then seal it (many of these jugs had metal covers).

Of course, a jug cannot just have the similar-looking head of a bearded man for year after year and century after century for no reason. What was the significance? This would prove to be the most difficult aspect of the information-gathering. It was one great string of speculation. I shall record here a couple of the suggested ideas. For those with a great capacity for endurance--the reading to be found on the internet covering subject this will keep you occupied for a while.

Well, first of all there were several things which appeared on the jugs--seals, text and the bearded man's head...but the constant was the bearded man's head. Some were apparently mayors that were depicted or other relevant personages in the city. Perhaps a certain cardinal (Roberto Bellarmine).
**It is interesting to note that these jugs were already in production well before the cardinal began his protests, however.

Some believe that the bearded heads depicted the "Wild Man" a well-known mythical figure in ancient Northern Europe.
Another idea was that the pottery makers depicted uglier faces because the authorities were closing some pottery shops because of the use of contaminated substances in coating or in the clay.

Well that was the shortened version of the research. The final stage was to contact an archaeological group with descriptions of the finding of the artefact and a couple of foto's. Here is the response we received:

"Thanks for sending the good and clear foto's.
It is indeed the neck of a beardman jug. We suspect that it was made in ~1650 in Frechen nearby Keulen (Germany).
The late dating of this object is because of the crude mask and the sloppy use of the cobalt pigment (the blue portions). The earlier ones were made more carefully.

Take good care of it".

Well, that is the story of the bearded man find and the story that lay behind this interesting archaeological find.

 

That is awesome!
I often find bits of glass and brick, old square nails while digging in my yard. This was an old homestead so I find all kinds of fence pieces and plow bits ... in fact each time I dig I find SOMETHING in this yard! But nothing as exciting as your bearded man!!

 

Very interesting, Sjoerd, thanks for posting..
I, for one, am very interested in historical/archealogical things..
Hank

 

What a neat find. Imagine how exciting it would have been to find a whole jug?
I'm always digging up stuff around here... usually old nails, pipe, tools and toys, especially marbles.
There's a family story that there's buried treasure somewhere on our land. My uncle even came over once with a metal detector. So anytime I'm digging and hit something I think "Yes... I've found the treasure!"

 

That is fascinating! And you did such a good job researching your find--tracing the history of an artifact isn't easy.
There is a series of pots thrown by "Slave Dave" that have faces. The potter was a slave on a plantation in the South, and because of his artistry his pots, although unsigned, can be attributed to him. Some of those pots have faces that resemble the one you found.

 

That was great Sjoerd. I find lots of things here. Years and years ago there was a brick maker that lived on this property so I find very old bricks a lot. A few musket balls and fossils also.

 

fascinating reading! Thanks for sharing.

 

Cool S, What an interesting find and research for us to also see and know. The only artifacts I have seen around here are Chippewa Indan arrow heads. Every year after the fields were turned for planting my brother would walk through them and had the eagle eye for spotting them as he always came home with a pocket full...me? I never saw a thing. I guess I didn't look too hard. I was busy looking for animals and flowering plants, swinging from the trees and traipsing through the woods to actually look.

 

Thanks NETTY--It was amazing to hear how many things you find in your yard. Being on the ground of an old homestead, I could well imagine that you may uncover some interesting stuff upon occasion.

EILEEN--I am quite happy that you enjoyed the posting this time. I shall be interested in hearing what your son makes of the story.

I'm glad that you liked the thread, HANK--I am very interested in the same sort of things that you are.

What an interesting story, CHERYL--I couldn't even begin to imagine what a thrill it would be if you found that mysterious treasure. Good luck, miss.

Thanks MG--Interesting about Dave. I shall look that up.

Sounds like you have some interesting stuff in your yard as well, DONNA.

You're welcome, V.

Thanks CAROLYN--But arrowheads are SUPER interesting. You know, when I was working over there, the work was so high-pressure that I would spend my free time hiking and walking fields looking for artefacts. I started doing that because I found one by accident once and then did research and eventually developed a system for finding more. It was great relaxing hobby and the things that one would find were surprising.
I talked to a man once that was digging a hole to place a fencepost into and uncovered a clearish quartz arrowhead.
I still have a handful of artefacts that look at from time to time.

 

Sjoerd, very interesting.

Old bricks with names, and small medicine bottles and bits of pottery have been unearthed in my garden beds, but they are quite "new" in comparison to your find.

I found it very interesting how the bearded man had a long history dating far back into history even older than your piece. I couldn't help but giggle at "the earlier ones were made more carefully" . Sounds like how we characterize modern copies of older (previous decades) pieces. The same thing was probably said a half a millennia ago.

Great article!

 

That's really interesting Sjoerd. How exciting to find such an interesting and old object.
I've only ever found marbles and bits of plastic toys in our garden...

 

Enjoyed reading this post on the bearded man. What a wonderful find. The old marbles were very cool too. All I find in my garden is rocks and clay. When we lived in VA, I did have a small area in the garden where I dug up some old bottles, they were only about 30 or 40 years old. Thanks for reminding me why I enjoy checking in on the Stew

 

That is an interesting find.

We find all kinds of more modern things from old dumpsites in our area or on our property. Sometimes we have found old medicine bottles, liquor bottles, or just plain old trash. I really like it if we find old Indian arrowheads and other tools. One of my boys once found a fossilized hip bone from a human infant in a cave near here. That was kind of creepy though. We figured since it was so old, and near a very old settler's cabin, that it likely came from the 1700s or 1800s, perhaps a family who lived there long ago had lost an infant. We sometimes find old cisterns on forest lands too, near those old cabin foundations.

 

that would be sooo cool to find stuff like that-! It would probably take my mind off gardening and I'd have to go get my metal detector.