It seems the long weekend has brought all summer in a day today. We’ve had fairly cool temperatures up to this point so it was a bit of a tiring day in the heat and humidity. One bonus was the blackflies weren’t out, but the Eastern Cottonwoods are doing their thing and the air is full of little bits of white fluff blowing around and sticking to sweat and being inhaled inadvertently. Our crew bravely toiled on despite the conditions. We have some dappled shade, and there was an intermittent breeze, and lots of beautiful birdsong so we made the best of it.
The Ladybugs spent the day in the Archaeology Centre mastering mapping, but they will be on site tomorrow.
The Snakes, Bears and Foxes had a busy day. Their digging skills have all improved so much since their first day on site, and some serious earth was moved today. Other tasks that seemed really daunting at first like like taking levels and drawing plans are going much more smoothly with each time they practice. The rest of the field school is now when the real work begins.
I am quite charmed by this old apple tree on the site, near the foundation. It still keeps blooming every year, despite half the tree being dead. It has probably been around since the house we are excavating was still standing.
The Foxes working hard on removing the fill inside the wall they have discovered. Note the large cast iron pipe by Dee, and the blanket in the upper right of the excavation unit, waiting to be freed (see below). Mischa is sitting where we think there might have been a door. Danielle is holding a red bin in the background, which by the end of the day was almost entirely full of burned nails and other artifacts from this fill deposit.The Bears have finished removing the upper layer from their extension, and are planning the new context that has been revealed. Tomorrow they are going to document what we think is perhaps a fireplace, and then they will deconstruct it with the ultimate goal of figuring out the construction phasing of this structure and how it relates to the other walls, cuts, and postholes we can see. The Snakes are down deeper in their new excavation extension placed to track the concrete footing and found…it ends? Direct quote from James when he heard: “Whaat?!!”So it was back to excavating. Jocelyn, Sarah, and Jay are continuing to look for any signs of a wall heading south.Lucas and Konrad working on taking out the fill inside the walls. Note the blanket behind Konrad’s left shoulder, and the large cast iron pipe behind Lucas.
I think the artifact of the day has to be the blue blanket, which was finally released from the soil’s embrace towards the end of the day. This blanket originally appeared on the first day of excavation, and was thought to be a ground hornets nest of some kind as only a tiny bit of it was visible as the Foxes began their unit, wedged under a large chunk of crumpled metal.
As the excavation continued, more and more of the blanket was revealed! It’s looking a bit ratty and tatty, and has faded from its original bright blue colour, but the blanket abides. Textiles are a pretty rare recovery on sites in this region, but the fact that 1. it isn’t all that old (my guess is 1950s-1960s) and 2. it is predominantly synthetic fibres (I am guessing acrylic as it is crunchy) meant it preserved in the depositional environment. It seems to just have a basic turned and stitched hem at the ends, and the sides are just the selvedge from when it was on the machine loom. It does not have satin binding like other thermal blankets I am familiar with.
Lucas demonstrating the blanket is now free!
It’s looking like some thunderstorms will be passing through tonight, bringing welcome cool air, so the rest of the week is looking great for excavation and mapping exercises. See you tomorrow!
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!
There’s a little fox that we have seen a couple times hanging around the Archaeology Centre!
After the digging and cleaning is now the fun part, where you need to figure out what things are, what they were used for, who used them, and if you are lucky, how old they are!Artifact analysis is probably something you will enjoy if you like sorting and organising things together based on various properties.The rest of our crew spent the afternoon with James learning some principles of mapping, relational databases, knowledge management, and some of the math you need to figure out coordinates.
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….
New fragment of blue transfer print refined white earthenware!
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.
This lid is black transfer print, but it is pretty close to our example.
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!
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.
The Foxes spent the morning busily trying to get the new excavation area they had staked out yesterday down to the same level as the rest of the unit.It’s looking like their decision was a good one, as we have a quite substantial wall segment with a potential return appearing. How this relates to the structure is something they are eager to work out.The Ladybugs are continuing to battle roots but are encountering hints that they are coming down onto their next context.
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.
The Bears had their work cut out for them, with a very complicated exposure with lots of information to record.They steadily worked through the morning and managed to get the plan drawing done, which means on Monday after they take their elevations they can start removing this destruction layer and we can see what is underneath!The Snakes have exposed three new contexts in their excavation unit, which they have documented in their plan drawings.The Snakes also used the totalstation to capture the elevation data of the exposed excavation surface. On Monday, they’ll be able to start taking out the next context of material.
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.
Artifact washing in the wet lab.We are such a big group we are also in the adjoining seminar room!
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.
Our mystery bee, somewhat the worse for wear!
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.
1950s era ad showing some of the toys you could get.
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.
Our bee/wasp in much better condition!
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 toys of the vintage I remember as a kid…
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!
We had just set up and started digging for our second day when I heard the news pass through site, rippling downwards towards me. “They found a ring! A gold ring!”. They in this case are the Bears, who in clearing up the upper context of the bulldozed and destroyed structure scooped up a ring, which perhaps like the One Ring had been temporarily trapped awaiting its chance to walk freely in the world again! Glinting in the screen, there it suddenly was!
This appears to be a man’s signet ring of some kind, set with a red stone. The inner band of the ring has a 10K gold hallmark, and a sentimental inscription in cursive.
10K gold is a mixture of 41.7% pure gold and 58.3% other metals. Since pure gold is so soft, this particular mixture of strengthening metals makes for a highly durable ring that is suitable for daily wear. It does also mean this ring was less expensive to purchase than a pure gold ring. The stone is likely a garnet (originally granat), a mineral composed of mainly silica. The name of this gemstone originates from a 14th-century Middle English/Old French word gernet (dark red) and the Latin granatus or granatium (meaning a grain or seed). This is also related to the name for pomegranate (pomum granatum) referring to the red jewel-like seeds of the fruit.
Historically, garnets were considered to have protective properties and were carried by travellers as talismans to help guide them. They also were worn by warriors to boost confidence and strength. In more modern times, garnet is the birthstone for January and is traditionally associated with the heart, strong emotions, and life force, representing deep passion, commitment and loyalty. The band is a signet style, which often denotes power, authority and heritage, stemming from when rings like this were used to approve documents or apply as a seal to a decision. Certainly it combines potent symbolism, and part of what we do as archaeologists is unpack the meaning or semiotics behind these symbols. We’ll take a closer look when we have a lab day and see if we can glean anything more.
As for its life before it passed into our hands, we can only speculate…
Our students made excellent progress today. We’ve busted out the shovels, the mattocks and the trowels and the screens are singing as they sift the dirt. The site is alive with laughter and conversation.
Some excavation plans have not survived first engagement with reality and have required some pondering and decisions to change strategy. We have exposed some new features that instead of answering questions, have compounded the confusion. It’s a glorious mess at the moment and we are having a lot of fun.
The Ladybugs (Cole, Jazmine, Hannah, Kendra, Shanti, Hailey) have been industriously exploring their unit, which has provided some artifacts that may feature in upcoming blog posts!The Bears (Tony, Hazel, David, Makayla, Kaitlyn, and Carly) with their very stratigraphically complicated unit. Not the Cracks of Doom, but the most recent home for our ring nonetheless!A lot of painstaking work today by the Bears teasing soil from many rocks.The Snakes (Johanna, Cristian, Jocelyn, Rajiv, Jay, and Sarah) have several underlying contexts appearing and a strange concrete wall that is not aligned with how we think the main structure is oriented. This unit is also a bit of a mystery. The Foxes (Dee, Lucas, Grace, Danielle, Mischa, Konrad) have also been a little foxed by the non-appearance of an expected wall, so they have decided to extend their excavation east to encompass a wall-like arrangement of stones just outside their unit to see if things make a little more sense.
After many years of good luck, this season we seem to be plagued by rain! Depending on what we are doing we can often work through rain, but in this case if there is a lot of recording, the paper forms don’t survive very well! You can of course get special paper and notebooks that you can write on when wet, but actually in CRM work, rain is often a cause to call the day. Digging in mud means you can’t really see what you are doing as you are digging, and screening mud is also not much fun.
This morning we decided to start in the classroom since it looked like the rain would be over by first break. James went over planning and profiling, as we are getting to that point of the excavation. We also looked at stratigraphy and Harris matrices. After that, some students stayed with me to look at material culture for a little now that we have been finding artifacts, and the rest went with James for more mapping and survey instruction.
After morning break, we met on site when it promptly started to drizzle again. We could see a clearing heading towards us, so we decided to show Stage 2 fieldwalking to the students. Normally the field would have to be ploughed, but we just wanted to give them a taste of what fieldwalking is, especially if any of our students get hired on as field techs for the rest of the summer once they have completed their field school!
“Wait for itttttt…..!” James had everyone line up a couple metres apart to start the walk.At the end of our exercise, we now have a new crew of veteran fieldwalkers!
This took us to lunch time, so we broke for an hour and then reconvened back on site to do some digging as the weather had improved. We are finally finding artifacts, now that we have dug down through the sterile overburden that was added to the site some time after 2023, so that means back to screening!
A little mud can’t stop us!The students are learning how to excavate, balancing the depth taken plus keeping the walls of the unit nice and vertical as they go! Trinity, Zenya and Romy are doing a nice job here.
We haven’t found much yet, which makes selecting something for artifact of the day a little difficult! Today we had three finds which the students wanted to share with you, as equal billing.
First up is a bullet casing, which is a 22 LR (long rifle) or a 22 long. Both used the same size casing, the difference is the bullet size. We know it had been fired since there is no bullet, and also there is a mark of the firing pin on the base, so we can’t tell which it was. The 22 LR was more common than the 22 long, so it is probably that.
Our casing has a D headstamp which tells us it was made by the Dominion Cartridge Company of Montreal. It appears to have a tinned finish. Dominion first started making .22s in the 1880s, and up until World War II, I believe they were the only company making .22 rounds in Canada. In 1928 they became part of C-I-L (Canadian Industries Limited). I was able to find a later example of these cartridges online after Dominion became C-I-L with the same headstamp (picture lower right), but I can’t date ours for certain as it looks like this particular cartridge was made for a long time.
The 22LR is the most common type of ammunition sold today, as it is useful for hunting, killing vermin, and sport. Perhaps one of the farmers that lived on this parcel was protecting his livestock one day! We do know from past census records that this parcel had sheep, pigs and cows, as well as arable land and an orchard area.
Speaking of livestock, we have finally found some bone on the site, representing some of the animals the inhabitants of this parcel ate. Today we found a longbone shaft fragment, part of a vertebra, and a distal epiphysis (suggesting this was a young not-yet-adult) from what I think is a pig radius. We need to clean them up and compare to our department’s zooarch collection created by department member Dr Eugène Morin.
Three fragments of animal bone from today (top – long bone shaft fragment, left – vertebra fragment, right – distal epiphysis).
Our last artifact to showcase today is part of the base of a glass bottle. This was probably some kind of medicine bottle, and the shape suggests it is either rectangular or oval (a more rounded rectangle verging to actual oval shape, these terms are more an approximation as opposed to hard geometry!). This shape was very commonly used by druggists between the late 1870s until the 1920s. They often had proprietary embossing on the flat panels of the bottle. We only have a small part of the base, but it is enough for me to know it was a mouth blown bottle, possibly from a dip mould or probably in a cup bottom mould as that is the most common way these types of bottles were produced (I need to clean it and see if there are mould seams on the heel!). If we had proprietary embossing we could learn when the company existed along with more clues to manufacturing if we had more of the bottle or a finish.
Part of a rectangular medicine bottle base.
I am quite fond of medicine bottles, it is interesting to track all the various remedies that existed for various complaints, especially those that are basically an approved “medicinal” way to consume some alcohol to take the edge off after an exhausting day of running a farmstead!
The weather reports say it is going to rain steadily all day tomorrow, so we have decided to give the students a day off to study for their upcoming S&G test. See you on Thursday!
