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Has anyone done any research on the secondary market in bricks from waster piles or abandoned brick clamps? Here's the story: We were digging the site of a poor free black farmer in Delaware, on the east coast of the U S. There were only a few bricks, probably from the hearth. Two characteristics of the bricks struck me: 1. Every one of them was somehow flawed, and should have been discarded by the brickmaker. 2. They were otherwise identical to the bricks in a nearby stately home, built a couple of generations earlier. When you think about it, brick clamps for a very large house would create a rathe imposing pile of rejects. Even though you can hide a few bad underfired or overfired bricks in the core of a wall, you can't use all the bad ones. There are well-known secondary uses for waste brick from clamps, as for example when they were used as fills for the allees of brick churches. So maybe the old clamps were a source of brick for poor folks who couldn't afford the good new ones. Well, recently we dug a deposit of clamp waste. Apparently a clamp had been cleaned up; the waste brick were thrown into the clay pit, and the site was tidied up. What was striking was the fact that the largest waste brick were less than a half-brick in size. These were wasters that could not have been salvaged for much of anything, with warped and overglazed surfaces, cracks, and generally very bad appearance. It was clear to me that the clamp waste had been scavenged, possibly by the crew who were cleaning the site for the owner. So, if there was a grey market in waste or near-waste bricks, how do we document it? Has anyone else observed this phenomenon? -- **************************************** About 1607, residents of the Atlantic seaboard discovered Europeans. The Europeans behaved very badly, and many of the local people moved away. [log in to unmask]***************************