Bricks and Brickmaking: A Handbook for Historical Archaeology by Karl Gurcke

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 307 Bricks and Brickmaking: A Handbook for Historical Archaeology. By Karl Gurcke. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1987. Pp. xvi + 326; illustrations, tables, appendix, bibliography, index. $16.95 (paper). Dating bricks, determining their manufacturers, and understand­ ing how they are produced are concerns shared by all historical archaeologists and architectural historians. Bricks are practically ubiquitous on archaeological sites and certainly deserve a more systematic treatment than they have received to date. The publication of this volume, the first book that has attempted to provide a comprehensive treatment of brickmaking, is therefore timely and welcome. Its technological descriptions are good; brickmaking terms are well defined; the bibliography is excellent; and there is a very useful and lengthy appendix of more than 2,100 brick brands in the United States and Canada (pp. 193 —321). This alphabetical listing includes the brand name, manufacturer’s name, dates of manufac­ ture, and location of manufacture. Admittedly, this is a small fraction of all trademarks that have been coined through the years—as Karl Gurcke himself notes (p. 195), the International Brick Collectors Association has already inventoried nearly 11,000 brick brands. Hence the book falls considerably short of the claims on its cover, that this is “a definitive handbook for the identification of bricks . . and that “the author presents a dazzlingly comprehensive survey of the brickmaking industry in the United States.” It is very narrowly focused on the Pacific Northwest (Idaho, Washington, and Oregon). The description of the technology in­ volved in making kiln-fired clay bricks (chap. 1) is quite solid and applicable to the study of bricks everywhere, and there are an adequate number of photographs that help elucidate brickmaking techniques and brick types. But the subsequent chapters on “Indus­ trial History,” “Form and Function,” and “Archaeology” fail to provide information that is of use to other regions of the United States or Canada. In fact, this attempt to define the entire brick industry based just on its short history in the Northwest is a serious weakness. The much longer history of brickmaking on the East Coast is given no more than a few pages, and the presence of bricks on archaeological sites outside of the Northwest is virtually ignored. It would be impossible to review this book without mentioning a rather remarkable assertion, namely, that “archaeologists [have] ig­ nored bricks” and that the book is therefore needed “to fill a gap in the archaeological literature” (p. 1). In reviewing the admirable bibliography, which has over 500 historical and archaeological entries, I find it hard to imagine how much might be written on bricks if scholars were to take the subject seriously! A more substantive and more embarrassing complaint should be raised over the quality of the 308 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE editing. There are a great many typographical errors, occasionally accompanied by sloppy punctuation and grammar. The book is also almost totally descriptive and chronological. One is left wondering whether bricks can be used to answer deeper questions about the society that made them. In summary, Gurcke’s work makes a useful contribution to the study of brick technology, and it presents much site-specific informa­ tion on the Pacific Northwest. However, its excessively provincial focus makes it of dubious use to scholars who happen to work outside that region. David R. Starbuck Dr. S i arbi ck is editor oi IA: The journal oj the Society for Industrial Archeology. Building Domestic Liberty: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Architectural Femi­ nism. By Polly Wynn Allen. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Pp. x+ 195; illustrations, notes, index. $25.00 (cloth); $11.95 (paper). Building Domestic Liberty belongs to a growing literature on the history of the American home and the housewife, a literature prompted in part, no doubt, by the dramatic changes in those institutions in the past few decades. (The housewife is rapidly vanishing: 70 percent of married women with school-age children are now in the labor force—compared with 30 percent in 1960—along with 56 percent of married women with children under six— compared with 18 percent in 1960.) This literature can be divided into studies of the home itself (Ruth Schwartz...