ABSTRACT
The point made at that time was that quantification of European ceramics from eighteenth century British American sites would allow the archaeologist to date the occupation period of a ruin. The percentage relationships of ceramic types from various ruins in the mid-eighteenth century colonial English town of Brunswick, North Carolina were compared. The pipestem analysis tool as well as our ceramic analysis tools and other constructions built on a chronological framework are based on the evolution of form through time. The time required for the spread of the cultural material representing the horizon is a factor to be considered, as Willey and Phillips point out. Historical archaeology is plagued by reports revealing no interpretation of any kind, historical, anthropological, or archaeological to justify a catalog type publication of objects. The measure of the reliability of the temporal bracketing and mean ceramic formula analysis tools is the degree of correlation between the interpreted dates and historic dates for the particular site.
