Efforts to determine provenance of ceramics recovered in excavations in the New York region, led to the establishment of a collection of ceramic analytical data. This initiative, called the New Netherland/New York ceramic chemistry archive (or NNNY), is located at Fordham University. The brick component of the archive is especially important. The use of an inexpensive, recently developed multielement analytical technique, inductively coupled plasma emission spectroscopy (or ICP), has been the basis for all NNNY determinations. The article presents a demonstration of how ICP characterization works in the discrimination of brickmaking establishments along the Hudson River in the late 19th century.