17th or 18th century latten spoon

[BobinSouthVA]

Well this isn't exactly todays find, however I did find it a few years ago. Funny thing is I didn't think much about it at the time, and it ended up in my truck door.

fast forward to this weekend. We had the kids at York River State Park to take a hike. While the kids were on the swings and the wife was watching the dog, I took a peak inside the visitors center. They had relics on display from the plantation digs in the area, lo and behold there was the same looking piece I had found. I never thought it was a spoon since the cut looked intentional. I assumed there was some other use. Who knows maybe the cut was intentional, it seems pretty straight.

However I cannot make out the maker engraving in the bowl, so I may not be able to date it properly. Here are the marks I'm trying to compare it against.

http://tinyurl.com/4vh976a

Thanks for looking and HH.

 

[Coin Stalker]

Great find thanks for sharing

 

[spitfire55]

 

[dfx willy]

wow bob looks like the same one to me! 1660s hey thats a old spoon. willy

 

[BobinSouthVA]

wow bob looks like the same one to me! 1660s hey thats a old spoon. willy

Thats the same thing I thought when I saw it. Maybe they were cut this way to be able to scrape all the food off the bottom of a plate?

 

[Daedalus]

This is really cool, I like things like this.
Great find !

 

[EagleDown]

Actually, it could have been used for many things. Slices of pie, applying mortor to bricks, (and the list goes on.)

The terminology; "Latten" is applied to the metal, rather than usage according to this discription from wikipedia:

The term Latten refers loosely to copper alloys, much like brass, employed in the Middle Ages and through to the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, for items such as decorative effect on borders, rivets or other details of metalwork (particularly armour), livery and pilgrim badges and for funerary effigies. It was commonly formed in thin sheets and used to make church utensils. Brass of this period is made through the calamine brass process, from copper and zinc ore. Later brass was made with zinc metal from Champion's smelting process and is not generally referred to as latten. This calamine brass was generally manufactured as hammered sheet or "battery brass" (hammered by a "battery" of water-powered hammers) and cast brass was rare.

"Latten" also refers to a type of tin plating on iron (or possibly some other base metal), which is known as white latten; and black latten refers to laten-brass, which is brass milled into thin plates or sheets.

The term "latten" has also been used, rarely, to refer to lead alloys. [1]

In general, metal in thin sheets is said to be latten such as gold latten; and lattens, plural, refers to metal sheets between 1/64" and ≤ 1/32" in thickness.