The rain today meant we couldn’t effectively excavate. So we are indoors and keeping up on the artifact washing and processing, and some more classroom instruction. We were fortunate to get all the artifacts we recovered to date washed and drying on the racks by lunch, and the material we washed the other day was bagged up and brought up to the classroom so we could begin to analyse it in more detail. Hooray!
In the process of washing today, this year’s students helped me to solve a mystery that has been puzzling me for the last year or so. Because we often find only parts of objects, often they remain enigmas, a tantalising hint at something more that is never realised.
Last year when I was working on the analysis of the artifacts from BcGn-17, I came across some blue transfer print ceramic pieces. One was a segment of an interlocking lozenge border, quite distinctive from the other dishes I had come to be familiar with. The other was what I was convinced was the feet of a bear. It was a tiny fragment of an animal’s feet, but something just said bear to me about it. I put it aside after recording, thinking that I would never know what pattern that piece came from.
There was one set of material from last year that had been overlooked from last season. This was recovered inside the root cellar/drain feature that they worked so hard to uncover! As this year’s students tackled that collection of bricks, nails, a spoon, bones, and other fragments, I saw a flash of familiar blue lozenge pattern and the back of an animal….
We also had some writing “_UINE RUSS_”. Genuine Russian…what? Something to do with a bear?
Turns out those fragments I had been finding were not tableware, but the lid to a jar of bear grease, which purports to help Victorian men achieve their hirsute dreams. Bears grease first appears as a remedy for thinning or balding hair in the middle of the 17th century. Prior to this, most fashionable men wore powdered curly wigs, which meant that it didn’t really matter what your natural hair looked like. The new emergent male hairstyles were short, neatly trimmed and flawlessly groomed. The ideal hair colour was dark brown or black instead of a powdered white or greying natural hair, and texture was thick with no thinning or balding. By the mid to late 1800s, hair restoration and dye products were marketed and eagerly consumed by both men and women.
Why bear grease? I assume because of some sort of sympathetic magic, since bears are strong, and have shaggy, healthy coats (well, usually – don’t do an internet search for a bear with mange if you want to be able to sleep), their grease must help to engender that property when applied to other hair? Russian bears must be extra hairy, powerful and virile! This cosmetic appears to mostly fall out of production around the end of the Victorian Era, but it does linger on in the Atkinson’s catalogue until the end of WW1.
Now whether or not our container actually contained genuine Russian bear grease is another question! The fat was often not from bears (Russian or otherwise), but goose, pig, or beef tallow. In order to combat the heavy unpleasant smell, it was sometimes scented with essential oils or herbs. The fashion to dress hair with oily odoriferous substances is part of the reason why antimacassars or special cloths were invented to have on the back of upholstered furniture so that the grease from dressed hair (macassar oil, bear grease, or otherwise) wasn’t soaking in to expensive and hard to clean furniture!
Our pot of grease appears to be generic with no named branding on it, but based on similar examples online I would guess our pot dates from the 1860s-1880s. This coincidentally supports our current idea that the feature excavated is a root cellar from a structure that was abandoned once the “new” brick house was built some time in the later 1800s on the site. The leftover bricks, rubble, and other by that point non-fashionable ceramic dishes etc., plus a hair remedy might have been conveniently gotten rid of in the old root cellar. Certainly someone in this household was concerned with thinning hair and determined to do something about it but perhaps on the down low.
Tomorrow is looking like rain as well, so we shall flip our groups and do the same thing again!
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