Avery Decoste
I discovered this comb in our woodlot site BcGn-15 while doing historical feature characterization. On the 12th of May, I was in a group with Maddie, Cam, and Falon and we were essentially looking for archaeological remains that can be seen while walking around the site. While it was one of the hotter days, we were lucky enough to be in the shade of the trees.
The comb has the words “Pro-phy-lac-tic” in a cursive style as well as “nylon” and the number 130 all written on the handle. The location of the comb was near a bunch of other domestic garbage, such as old fanta cans, coke bottles, and wrappers, which must have been some kind of garbage dump.
When looking through these domestic artifacts, we learned that you would normally order them by different categories such as food and drink, clothing, and personal. The comb would fall under the personal category. When looking up Pro-phy-lac-tic, I found a brush company, which was established in Massachusetts in 1866 as “The Florence Manufacturing Company”. The company changed their name in 1924 to “Pro-phy-lac-tic Brush Company”, which mainly produced toothbrushes and was the largest manufacturer of them in the United States during 1924. Eventually in 1930 the company was bought by Lambert Pharmaceutical Co., which is now commonly known as Pfizer.
The comb is nylon and provides us with a terminus post quem date (or earliest date) of 1935 because that is when nylon was invented.
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