Romy Stark
While getting elbow deep into a dig site doesn’t give you the most personal understanding of a time period, or the people who lived there, the landscape and finds do paint a good picture of what life may have been like during the period around our dig site. The discovery of these artifacts is always exciting, each one a dirty and somewhat unrecognizable puzzle piece of an incomprehensible and incompletable history. However interesting an item may be, they still do need to be treated delicately, not only for the artifact’s safety, as I’ve come to realize over the course of the field school, but also your own.
The more dangerous selection of items found in one of our dig units, outside of rocks, blunt and heavy shovels, and sharp-edged trowels, include not only many pieces of potentially sharp and rusty metal, or tiny shards of glass, but also many types of house construction/demolition debris. Some of this included insulation.
Now I have been raised to not touch insulation, the main reasoning nowadays being the billions of miniscule fiberglass shards I’d be subjecting myself to, but its hard to avoid touching it when you can’t identify it, which led to me picking up a handful of little soft tufts of something I recognized as manmade, directly onto my bare hand, and across the site to see what Kate might think they could be, only to be told its insulation, and that I probably shouldn’t touch my face at all until I can properly wash my hands. Some very exciting news to hear while its sitting on your bare hand, especially considering that given the time period the house existed during, it was more likely to have been made with asbestos than fiberglass.
Of course, as far as I am aware, the only exposure I’ve had to asbestos has only been by hearing about it through movies and tv shows, but I and many others are still very aware of the risks of asbestos inhalation, including asbestosis, mesothelioma, and lung cancers. According to the hazard alert for asbestos on the Government of Canada website, someone is at potential risk of exposure in any house constructed before 1990, making it a larger risk than many, including myself, may have perceived, something which is of course elevated with long term exposure. Thankfully being exposed to 50–100-year-old insulation for about two to three minutes isn’t fatal, so I had no reason to stress as long as I washed my hands, but it still did get me thinking about previous finds.
The day before this, I had made a mental note of a particularly interesting fragment of green glass, the vintage soda bottle green glass itself being very common in the finds we had been digging up to this point, but this piece was much brighter than I had remembered seeing previously. After our run in with [potentially] asbestos insulation, I had started thinking about other sorts of more dangerous materials that may have been more popular throughout the late 1800’s to the 1950’s, the more vibrant green glass bringing to mind the uranium glass popular during the Victorian period, also something I’ve passively learned about through various pieces of media. The radiation of the uranium glass typically is not enough to cause any sort of harm just by having a piece in your home, but like the use of asbestos, has its harmful aspect being through direct ingestion. Though harmful or not, with the horror stories of radiation poisoning I’ve heard I would still rather keep my distance.
Of course, the brighter green glass pieces we unearthed were actually pieces of pop bottles, the ‘7-up green’ of these bottles definitely not matching the translucent light yellow green hue of uranium glass, but between the glass and the insulation, as well as the many rusty metal pieces, working with the artifacts of BcGn-15 during this field school had not only given me a better appreciation for our everyday trash, and how what I throw away today may be archaeologically valuable in 60-100 years time, but also for construction and food-grade safety standards we have in place today, and what many people may be risking when dealing with historical items.