Botija is a term used by archaeologists for a style of ceramic vessel produced in Seville, Spain from early in the 16th-century through the middle of the 19th century. It was radially symmetrical, widest near the top, tapering down to a rounded or nearly pointed bottom. It had a fairly small mouth, and did not have any handles or protusions. While the measurements of individual botijas vary, they tend to cluster around roughly standard sizes. They were sealed with cork stoppers. Botijas were widely used for shipping and storing liquids and some solids, and whole or broken botijas are found almost everywhere the Spanish Empire reached, as well as areas that the Spanish never controlled. Changes to certain elements of botijas over time, documented from jars found in shipwrecks of known date, allow whole jars and sherds found in archaeological sites to be roughly dated.
Names Spanish records refer to botijas peruleras, botijas medias, botijuelas, botijuelas peruleras, and botixuelas. In colonial Guatemala, the terms botija de vino (wine), botija da aceite (oil), and botija de aceitunas (olives) are attested. Larger jars were commonly called botijas perulera or just peruleras, while the smaller ones were often called botijuellas. Perulera may derive from "Peru" or from the , a glazed pitcher. (Perulera was also used for boxes, crates, and bundles.) The term botijuella was not used consistently. It might have sometimes been used for larger jars, but when used in the same context with botija, it always meant the smaller jar.
American archaeologists have generally called bojitas found at archaeological sites "olive jars" or "Spanish olive jars". Archaeologists have been inconsistent in use of "olive jar", varying between "olive jar" as a name for all Spanish ceramics, and as name for the most common type, the botija. Other types of Spanish ceramics that are sometimes called "olive jars", and sometimes "Spanish storage jars", include the , , and . American archaeologists recognize that olive jars were used to transport and store many products other than olives, but the term is in wide-spread use, and not easily replaced.
Form Botijas were widest near the top with a rounded to pointed bottom and a narrow neck, resembling amphorae, from which they are believed to have been derived. Botijas are a continuation of classic Mediterranean traditions. Another theory is that Botijas evolved out of the dolium, an ancient storage vessel, in the first half of the 16th century. (Dolia were used in the construction of the Seville Cathedral, in the way botijas were later used in construction.) Most of Europe used wooden casks for storing and transporting goods while Spain continued to also use ceramic jars, probably because it lacked sufficient supplies of timber suitable for making large quantities of casks.
Many botijas were egg-shaped, while others were globular, carrot-shaped, or had long, more or less tubular bottoms. Rims around the mouths of early botijas were thin, but in the 1560s to the 1580s the rims became thicker, with a "donut" shape. Rim forms changed gradually from a triangular cross-section in the late-16th and early 17th centuries to more rounded in the mid-17th century to very rounded with a protruding lip by the early 18th century. Those changes can help date archaeological sites, although not precisely.
Sealing The small size of mouths of botijas allowed them to be closed with cork stoppers. Cork has been found associated with jars. Jar rims found in the wrecks of the Santa Margarita and Nuestra Senora de Atocha still had cork stoppers in place, including two that had pitch attaching the cork to the rim. Many of the jars found in the Conde de Tolosa and Neustra Senora de Guadalupe, which wrecked in Samana Bay in 1774, had corks inside them, even if the jars were otherwise empty. One jar from those wrecks, containing pitch, had a thin piece of leather placed over the opening with a cork stopper inserted over it, so that the leather may have acted as a gasket. Other ways of sealing jars are known. Discs of flattened, unglazed clay were found with jars at the Fortress of Louisbourg, and a jar dredged from the River Rance in Brittany contained two ceramic stoppers, both with tapered sides, one of which had a handle.
Classification Goggin John Mann Goggin created a typology in the mid-20th century for the ceramic containers found at archaeological sites associated with Spanish presence which are commonly called "olive jars" or "Spanish olive jars". He recognized Early, Middle, and Late styles based primarily on the stratigraphic sequence of styles and of the paste used in jars found at several archaeological sites. While all three of Goggin's styles were made with very similar pastes, the Early Style differed considerably from the later styles, being round in profile and somewhat flattened in cross section, and having two handles at the top. Goggin's Early Style is now recognized as the . The cantimplora was not used past the 16th-century for shipping to the Americas. Goggin's Middle and Late styles are botijas, which appeared early in the 16th-century, overlapping with the cantimplora.
Goggin recognized three forms in the Middle Style, and four forms in the Late Style. Form A is egg shaped, long, tapering slowly from the widest point just below the rim to a rounded bottom. Form B is nearly globular. Form C is widest further below the rim than form A, and tapers down to a narrower bottom than form A. Form C is rare, and documented only from Santo Domingo. Form D, known only from the Late Style, is widest somewhat below the rim, tapers in quickly, and has a long narrow, tubular bottom.
James In 1988, Stephen James described more than 1,000 intact ceramic jars recoved from two ships, the Conde de Tolosa and Neustra Senora de Guadalupe, which sank in 1724 in Samana Bay on the north coast of Hispaniola after sailing from Cádiz, Spain. He recognized four forms among the intact jars. They were variously unglazed, glazed only on the interior, or glazed on the interior and exterior. Intact jars from the wrecks were measured, including the volume of water held for jars with interior glazing. Interior glazing is believed to indicate the jar was intended to hold liquids that could be readily absorbed by unglazed ceramics. Sherds from broken jars were examined for paste composition, and were found similar enough to suggest that all of the jars were made from the same source of clay.
Form I jars from the wrecks are egg-shaped and the largest found in the shipwrecks, ranging from 47 to 52 cm in height, 29.3 to 32.8 cm diameter at the widest part, and 15 to 20.1 liters in volume. They correspond to Goggin's Middle Style Shape A. Most of the jars have an empty weight of 8.5 to 9.5 kg. The jars have openings or mouths with an external diameter between 10 and 10.2 cm and a somewhat flattened rim with a lip. About 66% of these large jars were glazed on the interior, or on both the interior and the exterior.
Form II jars are about half the height of Form I, and resemble Goggin's Middle Style shape B, globular in shape, with a conical shoulder meeting the body of the jar at an angle. The Form II jars range from 23.5 to 29.5 cm in height, are 22 to 27 mm in width, and range from 3.3 to 7.2 litres in volume. Almost 85% of the Form II jars are glazed on the interior or both the interior and exterior. The openings vary in size, and, unlike the other forms, do not have lips on the rim.
Form IV jars are "carrot-shaped", with a rounded top and a long body tapering to a point. The sides of the body are either straight or incurved. These jars are also relatively rare, making up 2.2% of the jars found in the wrecks. They are 36 to 45 cm tall, with a maximum diameter of 18.2 to 19.2 cm, and a Volume of 3.01 to 3.8 litres. None of these jars were glazed. Two of the Form IV jars contained olive pits.
Form III jars have a concave bottom, which allows them to sit upright on a level surface, unlike the other jars discussed. There were only 11 of the Form III jars out of the more than 1,000 intect jars in the collection. Form I, III, and IV jars all have lipped rims, and probably all took the same type of cork stopper.
Escribano and Mederos G. Escribano Cobo and A. Mederos Martín published a classification in 1999, recognizing four types, Botijuela Type A (1475–1800), Botijuela Type B (1550-1800), Botijuela Type C, (1600–1725), and Botijuela Type D (1775–1850).
Busto-Zapico In a paper published in 2020, Miguel Busto-Zapico analysed 40 jars found in Spain, all made in Seville. He described four types of botijas: C1, a compact jar with a circular profile, similar to Escribano and Mederos's Botijuela Type B, which held an average capacity of about six litres; C2, a jar of small size and capacity with a thin lower body, similar to Escribano and Mederos's Botijuela Type D, with a capacity of 1.3 litres; C3, of large size and capacity, tending to piriform (wide top, reduced waist, "pear-shaped"), similar to Escribano and Mederos's Botijuela Type C, with a capacity of 22.5 litres; and C4, with a capacity of 37 litres, similar to Escribano and Mederos's Botijuela Type A. He proposed that C1 jars were used for both liquids and solids, C2 jars were probably used primarily for wine, C3 may have been used for either wine or oil, while C4 may have been restricted to transporting oil.
Production The production of botijas was concentrated in Andalusia, with Seville being the most important center of ceramic production in the Iberian Peninsula during the Early modern period. The Casa de Contratación de Indias (the institution that controlled trade with the New World) was established in Seville in 1503, where it remained until it was transferred to Cádiz in 1717. The need for ceramic containers to hold merchandise sent to the New World led to development of potters' neighborhoods in Seville and Cádiz. Ceramic containers similar to botijas were produced in Portuguese centers such as Aveiro and in Spanish possessions in the Americas, but did not necessarily match the standards of jars produced in Seville. Colin Martin suggested that there were "official" and "civilian" botijas, with the official jars being Goggin's Form B (globular) in two sizes, while civilian jars varied considerable in shape.
The jars were thrown in two parts. The body of the jars from the base up to the widest part was thrown as one part, and the top was thrown as another. The two parts were then joined with a slip while being turned on a wheel. Busto-Zapico surmises that the potter throwing the base did not throw the top and did not know what the final size of the jars would be. Production of botijas was probably seasonal, with individual potters producing about 6,000 jars a year. New large bojitas cost just under one Spanish real in the 16th century, the price of a liter of olive oil, almost two pounds of meat or fish, or more than four pounds of corn.
Some jars with a distinctive red paste and a different style of rim marks may have been produced in Cazalla de la Sierra, 75 km north-northeast of Seville. Cazalla was an important wine-producing area, and botijas of wine from Cazalla were listed on several manifests of shipments to the New World. Such jars have been found at the Santo Domingo Monastery in Antigua Guatemala, the Huaco Palomin site in Peru, and Santa Elena (in South Carolina), in wrecks of ships in the Spanish Armada of 1588 and, possibly, in the Nuestra Señora de Atocha wreck in the Florida Keys.
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