Jar

Spanish Earthenware

This unglazed Late Style Spanish olive jar was found on the South Core Bank beach in 2008. The incurvate, tapering, cone-shape of the vessel is typical for Late Style jars dating to approximately 1780-1850. These wheel-thrown jars have a thin , doughnut-shaped lip or rim that attaches directly to the body of the vessel.

Late Style olive jars like thise have been found on Spanish shipwrecks and sites all over the Western Hemisphere. These coarse earthenware containers were commonly used, like the wooden crates of today, to ship a variety of goods and materials. Their primary use was for transporting liquids. The jars could be hung on racks or carried by means of a rope attached to the rim. Many Spanish olive jars have been recovered from Spanish shipwrecks throughout the West Indies and the Caribbean still containing the remains of various materials such as tallow, oils, dyes, tobacco , wax, and seeds. The plugs or stoppers for olive jars used for transport were most often made of cork.

Five Spanish olive jars of this type have been found along the beaches of Cape Lookout National Seashore. Some were corked and contained seeds that have been identified as Olea europaea, the European olive. European olives were transported in this manner from the time of earliest European contact into the 1800s. The fact that intact corked olive jars and fragments of others were found relatively close together suggests that there could be a shipwreck site not far offshore, or perhaps a shipwreck survivors camp, beached vessel , or another type of terrestrial site close by.