End of Penultimate Week and Friday I-Spy

The time is slipping away, we can’t believe we are almost to the last week! Lots of split groups today, as we tackle the to-do list of things to wrap up before the end of field school.

Anthony and Joel were conscripted to help with Jolyane’s crew, and at the Arch Centre we broke into washing groups and cataloguing groups. It was mayhem for a bit as we discovered and fixed some procedural errors, but we got everything sorted out and are on track to finish everything by the end of next week.

The dedicated washers Caedda, Brooke, Sarah, Dan, and Danny--even to the little bitty bits of glass!
The dedicated washers Caedda, Jodie, Katie, Sarah, Dan, and Danny–even to the little bitty bits of glass!
Charlotte and Emma working on cataloguing a context.
Charlotte and Emma working on cataloguing a context.
Mary and Stephanie work on bagging material from a context.
Mary and Stephanie work on bagging material from a context.
Wayne and Collette working on their context.
Wayne and Collette working on their context. Brooke is in the background entering our mapping data into a GIS program so we can see how it looks overlaid on a Google Earth satellite image.
Nic's head in process of exploding.
Nic’s head in process of exploding.

 

 

Here’s a super-size I-Spy to take us into the last week of this year’s field school.

Can you find: 1. A wrench; 2. A jaw harp; 3. Part of a metal door handle; 4. Three slate pencils; 5. A single-tongue buckle; 6. Part of a comb; 7. A tobacco tag.
Can you find: 1. A wrench; 2. A jaw harp; 3. Part of a metal door handle; 4. Three slate pencils; 5. A single-tongue buckle; 6. Part of a comb; 7. A tobacco tag.
Can you find: 1. A small piece of Rockinghamware pottery; 2. A fragment of mirror glass; 3. A Blue Willow plate; 4. A coral-pattern transfer print sherd; 5. Part of a stoneware ink bottle; 6. A pressed glass dish.
Can you find: 1. A small piece of Rockinghamware pottery; 2. A fragment of mirror glass; 3. A Blue Willow plate; 4. A coral-pattern transfer print sherd; 5. Part of a stoneware ink bottle; 6. A pressed glass dish.
Can you find: 1. Part of a scissor-style candle snuffer; 2. A bone button; 3. A coin (our 1854 penny token); 4. Fence staples.
Can you find: 1. Part of a scissor-style candle snuffer; 2. A bone button; 3. A coin (our 1854 penny token); 4. Fence staples.
Can you find: 1. A light bulb; 2. Three ketchup bottles; 3. A kidney-shaped bottle base; 4. Straw-tint glass.
Can you find: 1. A light bulb; 2. Three ketchup bottles; 3. A kidney-shaped bottle base; 4. Straw-tint glass.
Can you find: 1. An inkwell, 2. Medecine bottle; 3. Chicken bone; 4. Part of the strainer from a teapot; 5. Parts of the lid from a pressed-glass dish; 6. Part of a teacup where the handle attaches; 7. A pig tusk.
Can you find: 1. An inkwell, 2. Medecine bottle; 3. Chicken bone; 4. Part of the strainer from a teapot; 5. Parts of the lid from a pressed-glass dish; 6. Part of a teacup where the handle attaches; 7. A pig tusk.
Can you find: 1. A barrel ring; 2. A fuse; 3. Two slate pencils.
Can you find: 1. A barrel ring; 2. A fuse; 3. Two slate pencils.

Student Blog — Archaeology is Hard Work

This blog post from Charlotte gives some good insight into the experience of doing archaeology, and how persistence and care pays off! — Kate

Archaeology is hard work. I realized this within the first few days at the site, when we began shovelling piles of dirt, scraping rocks out of units, and carrying buckets of that dirt and rock around the site. There have been days when the shovel seems to be continually bouncing off rocks and getting stuck on roots, and sometimes the unit being excavated does not seem to be getting any deeper no matter how many buckets of dirt we take out of it. This is not to mention all the work of mapping the site and locations within the site (which is a breeze for people with good math skills but can be a nightmare for those, like myself, who don’t like math and haven’t practiced it since high school). All in all, it is exhausting work.

However, the rewards for this work are great. For me, it was an extraordinary experience when my group was able to find several pieces of a ceramic maker’s mark and fit them back together into one piece. It was so exciting to be able to find those pieces scattered in the dirt and put them back together in their original form. It made me feel like I was piecing history back together, a history that no one else knew about because we were uncovering it for the first time.

Though the work is not always that exciting and we can spend all day digging and by the end find that we did not uncover anything new, when we process the artifacts in the lab we are able to see all the interesting bits and pieces others have uncovered throughout the week. Seeing the artifacts displayed in the lab shows how much we really are uncovering from the site, even when it does not feel like it or when I don’t personally find the artifacts. For me, this makes the work exciting. Being able to help uncover, even in a small way, the history of this site is a great experience, and I am excited to be a part of it.

— Charlotte Clemens

Back from the Island!

Tuesday ended up rainy, so we went to visit the Hope Mill and Lang Pioneer Village. I think it was really useful and interesting for our field school students to see how a water-powered sawmill works, and also to see the houses and material culture of people who were contemporaneous to the people who lived at our site.

Wednesday and today we took a little field trip to Pigeon Lake, and started a cultural landscape survey of one of the islands. We’ve been here excavating in a past field school but this time we were interested in combing the landscape looking for non-buried cultural features such as stumps with axe marks, rock cairns, certain cultivars of trees, etc.

Wednesday we formed a line and spaced ourselves about 15 metres apart and started at the south and went as far north as we could before turning back. Today we focused on the alvar, and documenting some large clusters of cultural features such as white pine tree stumps that had been logged, and piles of rock in open fields, which are cairns.

I was too busy to grab many photos, but here are a few from today (and I hope some of the students write about their experiences for their blog posts!).

Sarah adeptly demonstrating the centroid of a cairn!
Sarah adeptly demonstrating the centroid of a cairn!
Recording the position and size of cairns on the landscape.
Recording the position and size of cairns on the landscape. Brooke and Caedda are at the totalstation, and Charlotte is in a bright green shirt to the right of the image, standing on top of a cairn. Collette is beside her getting ready to measure the dimensions. The totalstation is moved so that the telescope sights on the target and then a laser pulse is sent and used to record the target’s position. We also documented the diameter of each cairn. You can see Mary and Sarah in the centre of the zoomed image heading to the next cairn to be documented.
Part of the island has beautiful mature open maple forest, not many of these left in Ontario!
Part of the island has beautiful mature open maple forest, not many of these left in Ontario!

I think everyone had fun, and got much more comfortable with using the totalstation and theodolite for mapping! We are back in the lab tomorrow, to catch up on the artifact washing and catalogue backlog.

I hope most of us escaped getting poison ivy, but I think I have succumbed, alas…

A Fragment for Friday — Another Toothbrush!

The field school students are enjoying a well-deserved extra-long weekend. James and I have taken today to sort out some logistical issues for our proposed field school visit to Big Island on Pigeon Lake to perform a Cultural Landscape Survey for the Kawartha Land Trust.

I will be enjoying the long weekend as well, but before I do, here is a funny little random find from this week. Marit was excavating in the midden, and I was checking in on my rounds to see how it was going. While we were discussing what was happening, I happened to see a piece of bone sticking up from the surface beside the midden cut.

Now since the site has been walked on, plus rain, plus frost, plus other bioturbation, we have noticed a bunch of new artifacts popping out on the surface of the site this field season. In most cases we leave them, but important or interesting ones get tagged as a surface find.

I picked up this piece of bone and noticed it was worked. Someone had taken the bone and smoothed it and shaped it to a rounded end. It is quite pale, which means it was either bleached by a treatment, or from being exposed to the sun for a while. Since it was light on both sides, that suggests it was intentionally bleached.

Worked bone artifact, cylindrical with a tapered end.

I thought that was a bit curious, and suggested it wasn’t just part of someone’s supper like most of the bone pieces we have found on site! As I was walking over to get a surface finds bag, I suddenly noticed two small holes at one end of the artifact.

Worked bone artifact, with two small boreholes visible at one end, a toothbrush with the head broken off.

It’s another toothbrush! This one, however, looks much more rustic and home-made compared to the other one we found. It evidently broke at the head (no surprise as all those little holes for the bristles would have weakened the structural integrity). It’s still a fun find!

Happy weekend, and we’ll be back on Tuesday.

Another week done, and Artifact of the Day for May 17th, 2018 — Snuff Bottle

We are coming to the close of the third week of the field school! Only two weeks remaining.

Everyone worked really hard and completed their assessment units (motivated perhaps by James who suggested that if they were all completed the students could have Friday off!).

Danny and Brooke well into starting their unit.
Danny and Brooke well into starting their unit.
Stephanie and Mary starting their unit.
Stephanie and Mary starting their unit.
Wayne and Collette starting their unit.
Wayne and Collette starting their unit.
Anthony and Joel finishing up the profile drawing for their unit.
Anthony and Joel finishing up the profile drawing for their unit.
Caedda and Sarah finishing up their profile and plan drawings.
Caedda and Sarah finishing up their profile and plan drawings.
Charlotte carefully excavating around the rocks lurking at the bottom of her and Emma's unit.
Charlotte carefully excavating around the rocks lurking at the bottom of her and Emma’s unit.
Emma screening the last of the cultural layer from her and Charlotte's unit.
Emma screening the last of the cultural layer from her and Charlotte’s unit.

Now on to today’s artifact of the day!

Marit found it in the midden, and we believe it to be a snuff bottle. Certainly the handful of tobacco tags and the spittoon suggest use of chewing tobacco at this site. The dozens of fragments of white kaolin pipes, and several Bakelite pipe mouthpieces tell us also that some people were smoking tobacco on the site.

Today’s find suggests yet another use of tobacco, this time consumed through the nose! Snuff is finely ground tobacco that was “snuffed” through the nose. Snuff-taking by the Taino and Carib Indigenous peoples in the Lesser Antilles was first observed in the 15th century by a Franciscan monk travelling on Columbus’s second voyage. He brought snuff back to Spain and the practice soon spread throughout Europe, in particular by the French ambassador Jean Nicot (where we get the name nicotine from!).

Snuff was often flavoured with fruit, spices, floral oils, or menthol.

A German ceramic snuff bottle.
A German ceramic snuff bottle.

The name snuff comes from the Dutch, who called it snuif and were using it by about 1560. It quickly became an important luxury commodity. It didn’t really catch on to colonial use in the Americas, although American aristocracy took up the habit, modelled after the English style of snuff use. The use of snuff in England gradually became more common during the next 150 years. Unlike Spain, at that time there were few mills in the country to grind the tobacco leaf into powder, and users therefore made up their own daily supply – so as to keep it fresh.

British royalty were big fans of snuff—King George III’s wife was known as “Snuffy Charlotte” and had an entire room at Windsor Castle devoted to her snuff stock. In 1843, Queen Victoria once gave a golden snuffbox to a French butcher who served her “particularly fine beef” on a visit to King Louis Philippe of France.

"A Pinch of Snuff" by Edwin Harris (1855-1906)
“A Pinch of Snuff” by Edwin Harris (1855-1906)

Snuff grew in popularity after the Great Plague of London, as it was believed to have valuable medicinal properties. Despite its popularity, the practice was not accepted everywhere. Writings by Pope Urban VIII in the 17th century ban the use of snuff in churches and threaten excommunication for snuff-takers.

By the 1700s, the use of snuff peaked in England during the reign of Queen Anne. At this time, domestic production of ready-made snuff blends was well underway in England, although home-blending was still quite common. A Mrs Margaret Thompson of Burlington Gardens, who died in 1776 stipulated in her will:

I desire that all my handkerchiefs that I may have unwashed at the time of my decease, after they have been got together by my old and trusty servant, Sarah Stuart, be put by her, and by her alone, at the bottom of my coffin, which I desire may be made large enough for that purpose, together with a quantity of the best Scotch snuff (in which she knoweth I had the greatest delight) as will cover my deceased body; and this I desire more especially as it is usual to put flowers into the coffins of departed friends, and nothing can be so precious and fragrant to me than that precious powder.

She went on to request that Ms Stuart walk in front of her pallbearers, scattering snuff into the crowd and on their path. The pallbearers were to be the “six greatest snuff-takers in St James”, and were asked to dress in brown instead of black, and take snuff freely as they liked.

Ad for Handysides' Electric Nervine SnuffSnuff was seen as less common than smoking tobacco, and thus was the tobacco product of choice among the elite. By Victorian times, snuff was often used in snake oil claims, such as published in a London Weekly journal called The Gentlewoman, which claimed taking a particular kind of Portugese snuff would cure poor vision and allow one to read without spectacles!

German engraved pewter snuff bottle.
German engraved pewter snuff bottle.

By the mid-1850s, snuff boxes and associated formality had been somewhat rejected in the North American colonies. Instead, new traditions such as dipping a twig into the ground tobacco and depositing an amount in the cheek (a precursor to dipping tobacco, which is essentially moist snuff) were popular. The mid-nineteenth century invention of cigarettes though was the main death knell to snuff.

Our artifact is a small metal bottle with an embossed design. Snuff became stale very quickly, so it was common for a snuff box or bottle to only have enough for a day or two’s use.

Snuff bottleSnuff bottle

It appears to have been made by stamping out each side and crimping them together at the seam. It looks like it was plated in some kind of shiny metal, which has mostly worn off.

A small neck was inserted into the bottle, and presumably there was a stopper of some kind, which is missing. The bottle does have what looks like ground vegetative matter still inside! It’s interesting that we found this artifact on site, I have some thoughts about what it could mean:

  • it could have belonged to someone who practiced snuff-taking past the mid-nineteenth century decline
  • it could have been someone who was following the more aristocratic idea of snuff compared to smoking to set themselves apart
  • or, it is just a family momento that was curated past the popularity of snuff
  • or, this could suggest the person was recently from Europe, where snuff-taking was still popular for longer

We’ll never know for certain, but certainly an interesting find!

 

 

On the home stretch…

We’re more than half-way through the field school, and the assessment units are well underway! The site has gotten much more orderly and is humming along quite nicely as our students are applying the skills they have learned.

Let’s see how the first group of assessment units are going:

These 1x1s are quite deep, but Joel is still finding artifacts!
These 1x1s are quite deep, but Joel is still finding artifacts!
Anthony takes over screening duty.
Anthony takes over screening duty.
Katie and Jodie have found part of the old road in their 1x1.
Katie and Jodie have found part of the old road in their 1×1.
Caedda and Sarah working out how to get through a rocky layer.
Caedda and Sarah working out how to get through a rocky layer.
Emma and Charlotte screening through the next batch of excavated fill.
Emma and Charlotte screening through the next batch of excavated fill.
Their unit is coming along nicely!
Their unit is coming along nicely!

Even though many of the crew were working across the field on their assessment units, we were still busy on site. Collette and Stephanie were busy finishing their elevations for wall 1 and wall 9, and Wayne continued in the basement entranceway.

James also began teaching some of the students (pictured here are Brooke and Danny) how to use the total station to generate maps for the site area.
James also began teaching some of the students (pictured here are Brooke and Danny) how to use the total station to generate maps for the site area.
Mary found an 1859 Victorian Large Cent in the midden!
Mary found an 1859 Victorian Large Cent in the midden!
Nic cleaned up a wall profile from last year and drew it for our records. You can see the various layers that represent different deposits of soil onto the site.
Nic cleaned up a wall profile from last year and drew it for our records. You can see the various layers that represent different deposits of soil onto the site.
Dan worked on sorting out the sequence of walls for the basement addition, and solved a mystery!
Dan worked on sorting out the sequence of walls for the basement addition, and solved a mystery!

After lunch, all the students who had been working on the structure or mapping started their assessment units, so we will check in with them tomorrow morning. Tomorrow is our last official excavation day, although there is still plenty to do.

Student Blog — Notes from a Lab Day

Here’s a post from Jodie recounting her lab day experience. — Kate

Mouse jaw

Due to the surprise rain this Tuesday morning we came to the Archaeology Center and began to clean the artifacts accumulated from the previous week. Myself and a few others cleaned the artifacts from context 20.1, 18, and 14.

The process of cleaning the artifacts from this site is very simple as the artifacts are stable and won’t fall apart as they are placed in water.

We fill basins with lukewarm water and place an artifact into the water and once it is wet we use a toothbrush to clean off the dirt. Once clean, we place the artifacts onto trays so they can dry overnight.

Squirrel SkullIn all of these contexts there were a lot of bone and context 14 was all bone with a small amount of glass and ceramic.

This was exciting because the other two times we did artifact washing there was a lot of metal, so it was fun to interact with something new. I also really enjoy trying to identify what type of bone is present and what animal it is from.

It’s funny when someone picks up a pig tooth because at some angles a tooth can look similar to a human tooth.

There were a lot of cow and pig in the context 14 box which made it fun to try and guess which bone came from what animal.

Pig maxilla

There were 3 mandibles that still had teeth in them and one had a tooth that came out but fits perfectly back into the cavity.

There were also 2 boar tusks which was really cool to see, at first it was hard to identify what it was but once I cleaned the dirt off of the tusk it was easier to see what it was.

There was also a very small mandible that I at first thought was a claw but then realised that it had small teeth further back, we were informed that it was a small rodent and that it was most likely a mouse jaw.

Overall, my favourite faunal find from the site would have to be the squirrel skull that was found in the basement of context 14, its really small and sort of cute.

— Jodie Leach

Lab Update and Artifact of the Day for May 15th, 2018 — Bone Toothbrush

Heavier rain than expected drove us into the lab today, which was probably a good thing as we had a massive backlog of artifact washing to tackle. We had Marit join us again today to help with artifact processing.

I am happy to say our crew are superstars and we managed to record all the material we washed last lab day, and we have every single artifact recovered to date washed and drying on racks awaiting cataloguing. Hooray! It was also a good time to sort out some context issues and so Dan and Nic started to draw the Harris Matrix of stratigraphy for the site.

Emma works on cataloguing material from the midden.
Emma works on cataloguing material from the midden.
Sarah and Collette worked on cataloguing some surface finds.
Sarah and Collette worked on cataloguing some surface finds.
Jodie, Caedda, Stephanie, Marit, Dan, Katie, Wayne, Danny and Brooke kept the trays filled!
Jodie, Caedda, Stephanie, Marit, Dan, Katie, Wayne, Danny and Brooke kept the trays filled!
James retreated to the truck to do some work, as we took over all the rooms in the Arch Centre today, including his office!
James retreated to the truck to do some work, as we took over all the rooms in the Arch Centre today, including his office!

Charlotte cleaning the toothbrush.This discovery of this bone toothbrush sparked a lot of questions (and disgusted reactions) about dental hygiene in the past. I couldn’t resist a photo of Charlotte cleaning a toothbrush with a toothbrush, how meta is that?

While people have rinsed their mouths with water, wine, or vinegar or used rags to clean their teeth for millennia, the first “toothbrushes” were sticks that would be chewed on at one end to split the wood fibres into a brush-like end that could be used to clean the teeth.

The other end was often sharpened into a point to make a tooth pick. The next innovation was choosing aromatic or nice-tasting sticks that would be pleasingly astringent or flavourful. Toothbrushes similar to what we use today were made of bamboo and hog bristles and used for centuries in China, but for whatever reason they just didn’t catch on in the West.

Toothpaste in collapsible tubes was not available until the 1890s and didn’t surpass tooth powder in popularity until nearly 1920.

There are several recipes for tooth powders from the 18th and 19th century, but I don’t know if you would want to follow some of these recipes. Some were so caustic it was only recommended that they be used every few months! Others use chemicals like borax which we think of more as a laundry additive as opposed to a tooth-whitener. Still others had abrasives like chalk, charcoal and pulverised brick!

A 19th century London Times advertisement promised an assortment of wonderful results for those who used tooth powder:

For the TEETH. Patronized and used by his Royal Highness the Duke of Kent. TROTTER’s ORIENTAL DENTIFRICE, or ASIATIC TOOTH POWDER, had been for 20 years acknowledged by the most respectable Medical authorities, used by many, and recommended. The Powder cleanses and beautifies the teeth, sweetens the breath, posses no acid that can erode the enamel, and puts a beautiful polish on the teeth. From its astringency, it strengthens the gums, eradicates the scurvy (which often proves the destruction of a whole set of teeth), preserves sound teeth from decay, secures decayed teeth from becoming worse, fastens those which are loose, and proves the happy means of preventing their being drawn.

Tooth powder was often applied using rags until the first commercial toothbrush was made around 1780 by William Addis of Clerkenwald, UK. William Addis was a ragpicker by trade, which means he collected rags and cloth scraps which were then pulped and used to make high-quality paper, which was sold to scriveners and bookmakers.

History says he was arrested in 1770 for rioting in Spitalfields and thrown into Newgate prison, and while there decided that cleaning his teeth using a rag and some brick dust was not the best way. He saved a piece of bone from his prison slops, drilled holes in one end, and was inspired by watching the charwomen sweeping to get some bristles from his Keepers and thread them through the holes and glue them in place.

Now I think this story is pretty ridiculous, mainly because of access to drills and lengths of bone (which could be potential shivs!), and wire, and glue, and boar bristles while in prison! Nevertheless, when released he began to manufacture toothbrushes from a workshop in Whitechapel and later on Radnor St., Hoxton. While apparently there were 53 individual steps to manufacturing each toothbrush, here is a brief summary:

Addis would source the bone for the handles from lengths of the shaft of bullock or ox thigh bones purchased from butchers (the ends of the bones were sawn off and sold to make buttons!). Once boiled and bleached, they were cut into strips of different sizes (he was a master of marketing and had big ones for Men, smaller ones for Ladies, smaller still for Children, and an even teenier one called Tom Thumb). From there, the head and neck would be carved into shape, and the head drilled with holes for the bristles.

Badger hair was the mark of a true conoisseur, but Addis also imported boar and sow bristles from Russia, Bulgaria, France and Poland.

At this point, the blanks were sent out to be filled with bristles as piecework. He would contract to women working from their homes in Whitechapel and Spitalfields, and pay them only for each piece that passed his standards. This meant the burden of cost for tools, time, and materials was on the women workers up front, and they did not get paid unless the goods were deemed perfect.

Addis toothbrush ad.It is no surprise that he quickly became exceedingly rich, and there were Addis family members running the Addis and Wisdom brands in the UK until the late 1990s. A pretty good run!

Even though Addis was the first commercial toothbrush, others quickly jumped on the bandwagon and registered their own patent designs.

In general early toothbrushes all had cattle bone handles, and bored holes in the head. Bristles were held in place with a thin wire. The wire was either seated into grooves carved into the back of the head that would be filled by wax, or was fished through holes drilled into the top of the head. These holes were first drilled by hand, so they will tend to not fall in a regular, ordered pattern, and often the holes vary in size and shape.

Another way that toothbrushes can tell us about time is the shape of the handle in relation to the head and neck. Some researchers have created a typology, or system of sorting the shape of toothbrushes in relation to their rough time period of popularity.

The toothbrush we found on site. It says "EXTRA FINE" on the handle.
The toothbrush we found on site. It says “EXTRA FINE” on the handle.

Early toothbrushes are often “cranked”, which means they are either convex or concave. Convex cranking is when the horizontally-held brush has the head angling away from the user’s face. This was most common up until 1884, but drops out of favour by the 1920s. Concave cranking is rarely seen before 1884. Brushes with no cranking appear as early as 1840, but most appear to have been manufactured post-1870. Our piece is not cranked at all.

1857 Patent Application from the United States Patent Office registered by H.N. Wadsworth.
1857 Patent Application from the United States Patent Office registered by H.N. Wadsworth.
Boar and badger hair bone toothbrushes.
Boar and badger hair bone toothbrushes.

 Shortages in the availability of boar bristles caused by the war between China (the leading source of bristles) and Japan was solved by the invention of nylon in 1937 at the DuPont Laboratories. This quickly became the bristle of choice and we no longer have badger, horsehair, or boar bristle toothbrushes! Funnily enough, the Addis company was in on this deal and secured the licensing rights to make nylon and polymer bristles in the UK.

The final death knell of bone handled toothbrushes appears to have been World War II. Wartime rationing meant that bones were kept in the home to be boiled down to extract every possible ounce of goodness out of them.

So next time you are brushing your teeth, think a little about the lowly toothbrush and how far we have come!

Student Blog — Plans and Walls

In today’s student blog contribution, Collette discusses what we can learn from excavation and other archaeological recording techniques like drawing elevations. — Kate

Today some of us were excavating, some were doing stage 3 pits and some were drawing and planning the walls that were exposed of the house we are looking at. I was drawing the east side of wall 1 which is where the construction of the house may have started. It is important for these walls to be drawn because it shows us the construction of the house. The plans and drawings are used for comparing other plans to other sites, the way the building was constructed and finding the purpose of the building.

The walls of this structure are made from stone which indicates potential social status of the people living in the house. Back when this house was built which was in the 19th century, it was a luxury to have houses made from concrete because it was expensive while most structures were made from stone. Therefore, the walls of this house indicates that this structure was a house and that this family may have been middle class in terms of status.

It is also important to understand how these walls were built in order to understand the logic behind the workers constructing the building. Different methods may be used for different buildings as well as certain materials are more expensive than others therefore, the workers may have been trying to construct a building safely while using the resources they had.

Houses that belonged to the more wealthy may have been made from concrete which demonstrates the differences in methods and materials when building homes and other structures. We also use these plans to see if we can construct buildings today using the same methods and materials they had back then.

— Collette Martin

Monday Update and Artifact of the Day for May 14th, 2018 — 1854 Penny Token

It was a bright and warm day today, perfect for shifting gears on site. We started diversifying, with some students beginning their assessment units. These are 1x1m excavations that are very typical in contract archaeology work.

Our project on the structure is a block excavation, which means we are excavating large areas of the site in order to answer particular questions of interest to us such as the sequence of wall construction, or the timing of the use of the site.

In contract archaeology, an archaeologist is contracted to perform an archaeological assessment because of proposed development. The archaeological investigations are divided into different stages.

Stage 1 is a background study of a site to determine the archaeological potential. Stage 2 is a sampling of the proposed development area by digging 30cm test pits every five metres into subsoil and collecting any artifacts that are present. Depending on what is found, the archaeologist can either recommend that no further heritage concerns are present, or it is necessary to gain more information by a Stage 3 assessment.

Stage 3 generally involves test excavations of 1x1m units over a five metre grid spacing in order to discover the nature and extent of a site, and to see if the site has enough cultural value to warrant a Stage 4 designation. Stage 4 means that either development plans are altered to avoid impacting a site altogether, or, the site must be completely excavated.

So, part of the students’ portfolio in this field school is learning how to lay out and excavate Stage 3 units, because that is often what you spend the summer doing if you are hired by a company to be a field tech.

Reaquainting themselves with the Pythagorean theorem to make sure their units are square.
Joel, Anthony, Katie and Jodie were reaquainting themselves with the Pythagorean theorem to make sure their units are square.
Luckily they have Jolyane and her team nearby so they can sneak a peek into the underlying stratigraphy!
Luckily, Caedda, Sarah, Emma, and Charlotte have Jolyane and her team nearby so they can sneak a peek into the underlying stratigraphy!

Back in the structure, we shifted some people over to drawing, in particular Stephanie and Collette were working diligently at drawing elevations for certain of our wall sections. James got in on the action as well and filled in some of the newly exposed walls in our master site plan.

Stephanie painstakingly drawing the south wall!
Stephanie painstakingly drawing the south wall!
Collette drawing the east wall.
Collette drawing the east wall.
James planning the newly exposed north wall.
James planning the newly exposed north wall.

That doesn’t mean that excavations had stopped completely, though!

Mary continued excavating a fill layer from the top of the midden deposit, so that midden is all ready to reveal its treasures tomorrow.
Mary continued excavating a fill layer from the top of the midden deposit, so that midden is all ready to reveal its treasures tomorrow.
Wayne continued to work on the basement entrance, and found some interesting glass bottles of a stomach remedy, among other things.
Wayne continued to work on the basement entrance, and found some interesting bottles of a stomach remedy, and a toothbrush among other things.
Brooke and Danny continued defining the interior of the north wall.
Brooke and Danny continued defining the interior of the north wall.
Dan and Nic started getting ideas about the basement, in particular how this complete bulb survived under a large boulder!
Dan and Nic started getting ideas about the basement, in particular how this complete light bulb survived under a large boulder!
1854 Bank of Upper Canada Penny Token
1854 Bank of Upper Canada Penny Token

Today’s artifact of the day was another coin (although it was a tie between that and a bone toothbrush so stay tuned for a special post on that because it deserves its own mention)!

Like the other 1852 Half-Penny Tokens, this coin was made for the Bank of Upper Canada. It’s in coin alignment, which means it was minted at Heaton’s Mint in Birmingham, UK. Like the Half-Penny, the face of this coin has St. George slaying a dragon. The 1854 coinage has two variants, one with a plain “4” and one with a crosslet “4”.  Ours is the plain “4”!

If you want to know more about every tiny variation in these coins, please check out this 1934 work by Eugene Courteau, M.D.

As I mentioned previously, a compromise Currency Act was passed in 1853 and proclaimed on 1 August 1854. This act meant that dollars and cents could be used in provincial accounts as well as pounds, shillings, and pence, and were recognized as units of Canadian currency. The final coinage struck by the Bank of Upper Canada was in 1857, as by then they were more seriously discussing the total adoption of a decimal currency. By 1863 the Bank was complaining bitterly that they were not able to disburse their remaining stock of coins due to the shift to the new system. Post-1867, some were able to reach circulation, but the majority of them had been bought by the government and stored as copper bullion! They were melted down in 1873 under government supervision.

If you are interested in the development of Canadian coinage, please check out this excellent booklet published by the Bank of Canada.

Unfortunately, this coin was found in the basement, in a disturbed context. So, even though it is from 1854, which is the year that Charles Perry opened his Nassau Mill, it doesn’t tell us too much other than that.