Steatite Bowl

A steatite bowl is a vessel carved from soapstone. The classic form is an oblong, flat-bottomed basin with a lug handle projecting from each end, up to about 635 mm long, its width about half its length and its depth about half its width; deeper round bowls and small cups also occur (Holmes 1890, 1897). Walls are thick, and the gray to greenish stone feels smooth and slightly greasy.

Soapstone was quarried from outcrops between Vermont and Georgia. Workers cut a ring-shaped groove around a bowl-sized boss on the outcrop, undercut it until it stood on a narrow stem, and broke it free; the blank was then hollowed and shaped with stone picks and chisels, including reused grooved axes (Holmes 1890, 1897). Quarry sites are littered with broken and rejected blanks, and finished bowls keep pick and chisel marks.

Soot on the outside of many vessels shows they were set over fires, and both direct heating and stone-boiling have been proposed (Virginia DHR). Sassaman's radiocarbon dates on that soot place most Southeastern vessels between about 3,700 and 2,700 cal B.P. Some vessels were cached or buried, which Sassaman (2006) reads as a sign of social and political value beyond cooking. The key trait is a thick-walled basin carved from soapstone, often with end lugs and tool marks.

Length up to about 635 mm; width about half the length and depth about half the width, roughly 320 mm and 160 mm for the largest (Holmes 1897, converted from inches). Small cups and round bowls are much smaller.

Piedmont outcrops from New England to Georgia, with quarry districts in northern Virginia (Fairfax, Orange, Madison, Albemarle, Nelson and Amelia counties), the District of Columbia, Cecil, Harford and Baltimore counties in Maryland, southeastern Pennsylvania, and Soapstone Ridge near Atlanta, Georgia. Vessels were traded onto the Coastal Plain and as far as Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana (Holmes 1897; Virginia DHR; Shaffer; DeKalb County 2021; Sassaman and Brookes 2017).

Sherds are thick, angular pieces of soft, smooth stone with tool marks, not fired clay. Some early pottery was tempered with crushed steatite and copied soapstone bowl shapes, even the lug handles, but it shows fired-clay paste with stone grit (Holmes 1897). Flat perforated soapstone slabs, once called net sinkers, were cooking stones heated in the fire and used with Stallings fiber-tempered pottery about 4,500–4,050 cal B.P. (Sassaman and Bartz 2022). Truncer (2004) argued that soapstone vessels came before pottery; Sassaman (2006) countered that in many areas they accompanied or followed it. A cache of 12 vessels at Claiborne, Mississippi, dates about two centuries after the peak of Poverty Point (Sassaman and Brookes 2017).