It’s hard to believe we are at the end of the first week of field school already. This morning dawned quite chilly, it seems that we are constantly putting on and taking off layers depending on the wind and when the sun comes out. But once digging is underway everyone seems to be at a reasonable operating temperature. I think everyone agrees that this is much preferable to the humidity and heat we will get later in the summer! The bug situation hasn’t been too bad yet as well, although the blackflies are starting to appear.
Some of our groups have finished uncovering their first context, so they are learning some new skills like how to draw a plan of the excavation unit, how to complete a context form, and how to capture coordinates in three dimensions using a totalstation to map in the corners of the unit and the elevation of the exposed excavation.
As it is Friday, we packed up the site completely just before lunch, and met at the Archaeology Centre to start processing some of the artifacts we recovered over the past two days of excavation. We’ve had more than expected (although not nearly as much as our excavations at BcGn-23 in 2024) so we need to keep on top of it so we aren’t overwhelmed.
Lab day is always fun, because you get to see the material you collected actually clean and sometimes artifacts reveal new details that you didn’t notice before when they were caked with dirt. I was hearing a lot of “when did we find THIS??” and “Oh that’s so cool!” as the washing went on. Cleaned artifacts are laid out on trays (in varying degrees of coherence and organisation depending on the proclivities of the washer!) where they can dry.
Once dry, they are ready for primary processing, which means they will be separated by material type, counted, and bagged with a provisional tag. Their next destination is up to the department, where with the help of student volunteers, I catalogue and analyse the material for our archaeological site reports. Depending on how the excavations go this season, we might even begin this step before field school ends. Our minimum goal is to have everything washed and primary processing done at the very least by the end of the field school.
Other lab duties that will start to be incorporated include digitising the site plans after they are drawn and managing the GIS of the site excavation.
The artifact of the day today is this little guy, who had been intriguing me since yesterday, when someone showed it to me in the field. I thought it looked like a bee, and once it was cleaned it became apparent it was celluloid plastic, and had been broken and exposed to heat.
This is a Japanese-produced celluloid toy included in a box of Cracker Jack, most likely dating from the late 1940s-1950s. These waxed paper boxes of red, white and blue contained popped corn and peanuts covered in a molasses-based caramel. While caramel-covered popcorn was a popular street vended snack in the later 1800s, by 1896 the F. Rueckheim & Brother Company had perfected the manufacturing to keep the individual kernels from welding together into a block and were trading under the name Cracker Jack (slogan: “The more you eat, the MORE you want!”). By 1899 they had innovated a new type of waxed cardboard packaging, called triple-proof because it was proof against dust, germs, and moisture. This really was an innovation because prior to this, packaging was either in bulk, or heavy and expensive metal tins or glass bottles/jars. The popularity of Cracker Jack was immediate, including immortalising the name in the 1908 hit song, Take Me Out To The Ball Game, where the baseball-mad Katie Casey implores her beau to “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, I don’t care if I never get back”. The first mascots of the company were some anthropomorphic bears, but the iconic Sailor Jack mascot and his dog Bingo appeared by 1916 and remain to this day.
Cracker Jack began including free surprises in their boxes in 1912. The earliest items were small metal toys and charms produced in Japan. By the 1940s, they were mostly celluloid charms and trinkets.
I was able to find a complete bee/wasp in a cream colour, which was fun. It looks like they came in blue, red and green also. From what I can glean, this would have been considered a premium toy because it was one of the larger ones to be included.
We also have found a second Cracker Jack toy, a Great Plains Native American man wearing warbonnet regalia sending smoke signals. This also dates to the 1950s, and is most likely the result of the popularity of Westerns, which made up 25% of American film during the 1940s-1960s. The post-1960s era then saw a proliferation of television Westerns, but this genre dwindles and almost disappears by the 1970s. Finding these artifacts is really important, because this is a pretty good indicator that there were some children living in this house in the 1940s-1950s, so we can assume it was still a domestic space at that time and had not been repurposed into a more industrial or commercial use before it was destroyed.
Later inclusions in Cracker Jack include temporary tattoos, games, pencil sharpeners, drawing blocks covered in black wax that you would scratch off to make a drawing in the revealed rainbow background, tiny books, and a highly-coveted magnifying lens which every kid knows was never used to magnify anything except the sun.
Cracker Jack is still around today, but the “prizes” are simply stickers and a URL for Cracker Jack themed arcade games you can play online.
I think everyone is pretty tired and sore, but we have had an excellent first week and after the week-end to recover we are ready to begin again bright and early on Monday!
Leave a comment