Materials
Chess pieces have been composed of virtually every commonly- and uncommonly-worked material available to chess-playing cultures. Chess artifacts from various time periods and distant societies most commonly include the ivory and bones of animals, the wood of many tree species, and metals such as bronze and silver. Chessmen have also been fashioned out of historically distinct pottery compounds such as stonepastes and jasperware. These materials may have been chosen based on ease of access, manufacturing knowledge, or for their value and uniquity. The trading and cultural networks of the ancient world allowed for a chessman to travel great distances, whether finished or unfinished, and for the final artifact to be found far from its material place of origin.
With such varying materials come widely varying methods. Chessmen of wood and ivory were carved first by hand, then by increasingly precise and mechanical methods. Metal chessmen were carefully molded and polished. Mineral chessmen, such as pottery artifacts or carvings of stones and gems, were the product of specific artisan methods of their time. All of these production methods used, from the most direct to the most intricate, represent the historical knowledge of the technological and artistic cultures producing them.
Chess pieces, much like textual artifacts and other forms of artisanship, are the products of complex material and technical networks. Chessmen require a material support that a society is capable of obtaining, crafting, imparting meaning on, and using practically. They also require a social construct based on human communication, with broadly-understood conventions, in order to be used correctly and preserve their meaning. Thus, each chessman’s physical artifact imparts a material history of the people and societies that produced them, as well as an intellectual and artistic history of those who used and understood them.
Ivory, 1853.
These chessmen, whose professional manufacture in March of 1853 can be established from an inscription on the bottom, are made of ivory. The pieces are largely machine-carved, with all but the knight taking perfectly circular forms. The use of threading on the ivory itself allows for the carefully-carved knights to be placed on their circular bases. These chessmens’ familiar designs are consistent with Staunton and other practical styles from the period of their production.
Wood, 1860s, by Byron W. Stanton.
Carved by hand in the 1860s, the freehand methods used to produce this wooden chess set were quite dated when compared with contemporary developments. By the mid-19th century, wooden chessmen could be identically carved on lathes, and conventional templates such as the Staunton style had been popularized. These unique artifacts echo a long-preceding history of artisan production, displaying the flaws and inconsistencies from their single-handed manufacture.
Bronze, late 18th century.
Chess sets made of metal are notably less-common, due perhaps to the value of metals for other purposes, as well as the difficulty and cost of such precise metal manufacturing. This set composed of bronze originates in Spain, and is dated to the late 18th or early 19th centuries. While relatively discernable for practical use, the style of the pieces is exemplary of the regional and artistic variations which preceded 19th-century conventional styles.
Jasperware, early 19th century, by John Flaxman.
Though crafted within decades of the other artifacts on this page, this set of figurative chessmen contrasts them in many ways, lacking many practical aspects. The pieces are all white with coloured bases. While the kings and queens are unique, the other game pieces are duplicated from one side to another. This means that one’s pieces are all unique from each other, even the pawns, yet each one has an identical white counterpart on the other side. These chessmen are made of jasperware, a commercial stoneware compound that was popular in contemporary England.