A sealed archeological deposit can date no earlier than its most recent artifact, and a handful of twentieth century utility bottles confirmed that this chronological hodgepodge had been thrown into the privy pit shortly after the arrival of the Pringle Smith family in 1925. The scarcity of items from the Smiths’ period of residence, however, suggested that the family had filled the privy not with their own trash but with objects accumulated by the Middletons in the preceding century. The artifacts could not have collected in the house before 1871, when the Middletons moved back to their war-ravaged estate, or after 1900, when Susan Middleton’s death ended the plantation’s role as a regular residence. The artifacts left in the house spanned Susan and her husband’s entire lifetimes, from the costly dinnerwares of the wealthy planter to the plain stone china of his widow. As much as any exhibit at Middleton Place, then, the artifacts on display in the Spring House Museum bear testimony to the cycle of wealth and poverty, prosperity and decay, that characterized the nineteenth century Middletons and their plantation. POTTERY AND PORCELAIN [Illustration: uncaptioned] The Industrial Revolution introduced an era of mass production, technological efficiency, and mass consumption. One of its minor miracles was the perfection of a hard-boiled white ceramic that was within the financial reach of most of the population. Though hardly striking to the modern eye, the white ironstone plates pictured below (Fig. 2) are the result of years of experimentation by British and other European potters. In durability, purity of color, and cost-effectiveness, the everyday ironstones and granitewares of the late nineteenth century represent a triumph of western ceramic technology that has been little improved upon since the earlier part of that century. (See Appendix 1 for a complete listing and illustrations of ceramic manufacturers’ marks.) The impetus for this technological marvel goes back to the global expansionism of Europe’s seafaring nations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among the exotica brought back by early traders was Chinese porcelain, an impermeable white ceramic ware unlike anything produced in Europe. As trade with the Orient grew, so did importation of Chinese porcelain. By the eighteenth century, Chinese potters were regularly turning out blue-and-white “export porcelain” (Fig. 3) made specifically for the European market. East India Company ships were transporting it to England as “flooring” to protect perishable cargoes of tea. [Illustration: Figure 2. British-made white ironstone or granite china, 1891-1900. All four plates are marked “MADE IN ENGLAND,” a convention adopted in 1891 to comply with American import regulations.]