1700-1765 - Roughcast brass or bronze button with hole drilled in shank

1700-1790 - Silver front, bone or wood back, holes for gut fastening

1760-1790 - Cast white metal, iron wire eye, mold seam and plug

1760-1785 - Cast white metal or brass, brass wire eye, burr edge, spun back

1750-1812 - Cast white metal, eye and button are one piece

1812-1830 - Two piece pressed brass button, brass eye soldered to back

1785-1800 - Brass or bronze button, brass eye, soldered, no foot to eye 

1812-1820 - Brass or bronze, restrike anvil seam, brass eye with foot soldered to back

1830-present - Two piece pressed brass button, brass eye soldered to back

1750-1830 - Center hole to index turning tool, bone

1800-1860 - Cast white metal, one piece

Post-1870 -  Pressed steel, two-piece

Clay, or kaolin, pipe stems look a bit like narrow white tree branches with holes down their centers. According to an article by Maj. Robert J. Dalessandro, pipe stems were the "17th, 18th, and 19th century equivalent of the cigarette butt". Clay pipes had very long stems and as the stems became clogged, the ends would be broken off and discarded. It's not uncommon to find these discarded pipe stems, but it wasn't until excavations at Jamestown in the early 1950s that archaeologists began realizing that these discarded stems could help them date a site. J. C. Harrington, an archaeologist with the National Park Service, studied hundreds of dated pipes and realized that the stem's bore diameters directly related to certain time periods. These are the guidelines Harrington determined:

Bore         Date

9/64"    1590-1620

8/64"    1620-1650

7/64"    1650-1680

6/64"    1680-1710

5/64"    1710-1750

4/64"    1750-1800

You can determine the approximate dates of pipe stems you find like this: carefully clean the stem, removing dirt from the hole. Gently insert drill bits of the sizes mentioned above into the hole - the one that fits snugly gives you the size of the bore, which you can then match to a specific period.