A blog that I wrote in October 2024 (to be downloaded here) described my study of a recent donation to the TRC of 65 metal buttons. The buttons were collected without any context in the Netherlands. In this blog, I would like to elaborate on my findings of last year.
In the previous blog I suggested that, based on the shank type, these buttons could not be older than the 19th century. However, I was wrong. I now know that the oldest buttons are medieval (see TRC 2024.2625) and the group presents, in fact, a fair representation of buttons from every century since then until the 19th.
Metal button with a five-petalled flower and a key shank with a tiny hole. Part of the button has broken off. Medieval. TRC 2024.2625.
Key shank with tiny hole. Metal button TRC 2024.2625.
I was helped in my more precise identification by another collection in the TRC. These buttons, some forty of them, were donated to the TRC in 2020, and were reliably dated. I was recently re-photographing them to current standards, when I noticed many similarities to the 2024 buttons. By comparing both collections, I could categorise and divide the buttons into five groups, namely medieval, 15th-16th century, 17th century, 18th century, and 19th century.
After this, there were still a few buttons that I could not confidently give a date. These were flat, thin, and plain (see, for instance, TRC 2024.2595). Here the XRF data came in handy. XRF (X-Ray Fluorescence) scans can, without any damage to the item, identify the ratio of elemental components in an object through radioactive signals. Luckily, I had access to such a machine at the Leiden Archaeology faculty, Leiden University, and was able to analyse samples from both the 2024 and 2020 collection.
Metal (pewter) button with a flat surface and an alpha-type shank. 18th century. TRC 2024.2595.
The flat buttons, it turned out, are made up mainly of tin and a combination of lead and/or iron, making them essentially pewter buttons. A review of previous studies told me that pewter buttons were commonly manufactured between 1700 and 1850. With this knowledge in mind, I added the flat buttons to the 18th century bag and changed the information in the TRC database accordingly.
With the ratios on hand, I went back to the catalogue, adapting the descriptions to portray the buttons as brass, bronze, pewter, etc. and added the exact elemental ratios in the comments.
A cast spherical lead bullet or musket ball. 15th-18th century. TRC 2024.2770.An interesting discovery from the XRF analysis was TRC 2024.2770. This item was assumed to be a spherical button with a missing shank. However, the XRF analysis flagged this piece as an exception, being almost completely made of lead. Upon closer inspection, the 'button' turned out to be, not a button, but a musket ball! The rough edge was the place where the bullet was taken out of the cast, rather than a shank attachment.
This piece can be dated to anytime between the 15th and 18th century. Funny how things can be misidentified when thinking in a certain framework. I never would have thought the TRC would be in possession of bullets!
This has been a very exciting project, combining various techniques and approaches to understand the items in a new donation. I am looking forward to taking on more projects like this in the future.
28 July 2025
