Collecting Jamestown: Part 20. Krauwinckel Jettons

Jettons have poured from the Jamestown site since the first shovel pricked the ground.

Along with Irish half-pennies and pennies, these thin counters represent the most common “coins” dug from within the palisades of the fort.

Krauwinckel Jettons

But they are not really coins. Rather, they are counting pieces. They were produced in great numbers and are not rare. Jettons were typically sold in packets of 50 or 100. At least one full packet was brought to Jamestown.

The term “jetton” (or “jeton”) is derived from the French “jeter” and means “to cast” as in casting or moving markers on a counting board. Arithmetic problems could be solved very quickly using this method. The use of jettons was on the wane during the first quarter of the seventeenth century – replaced by paper calculations using Arabic numerals.

The jettons found at Jamestown were made in the Krauwinckel workshops during the late 1500s and early 1600s. The pieces were imported from Nuremberg. The standard reference for these pieces is Mitchiner’s 1988 catalogue: Jetons, Medalets and Tokens: The Medieval Period and Nuremburg. Check it out.

Krauwinckel jettons were discovered all across the Jamestown site. In the first season of digging, seven jettons were unearthed from Pit 1 in 1994. Alongside the jettons were Nueva Cadiz beads, book clasps, a matchlock plate, many jar and bowl fragments, of course a slew of pipe stems, plus a complete cabasset helmet!

But the largest of cache of jettons was to come a few seasons later.

A longhouse, of mud and stud construction, known as the Factory yielded a whopping 99 jettons. Thirty-one were discovered on the cellar floor. And, 54 more were mixed in the backfill from the 1610 rehabilitation of the fort when Lord de la Warr arrived and had the longhouse razed. The remaining 14 jettons were closer to the surface and not in a sealed context.

The Factory has been interpreted as an industrial and trading center. It also might have served as a supply depot. It makes sense that the jettons were found there, as they might have been used as intended – for accounting. Alternatively, some historians have argued that they were used for copper trading with the natives. This is an open debate.

Either way, Hanns Krauwinckel jettons are storied relics of Jamestown and belong in any Colonial North America collection. Similar jettons have been found at other seventeenth century colonial sites.