"Ritual Objects" and Caution

Remember this? It's an artifact from Mission Spit salvage. We found two of them, and after agreeing that none of us has seen anything like it (and therefore could not pigeon-hole it), began speculating. In fact, I managed to convince myself it could be part of a ritual object, that we had somehow recovered two finials from a cross. Maybe the hundreds of sherds and shards didn't say anything more specific than "people here shopped at the Hudsons Bay store," but pieces of a cross brought by the Oblate Fathers of the Mission? Cool.

Of course, I knew this was speculation rather than science, and even though I tried my damnedest to find proof, asking the Oblate archives for images and scouring the web, to consider these parts of an actual ritual object rather than roosting them in the dingy pigeon-hole we know as "unidentified" would be a leap of faith. Great story, plausible even, but unproven.

So I told the story, with caveats, and held onto a kernel of hope that one day I'd find that proof. Maybe a third finial would pop up (or a fourth, if the bottom part had one as well), or a belated Oblate response indicating that yes, of course, all missions were issued with cast stone crosses. I was repeating this casual hope the other day as my daughters and I visited the beach once again.

And then, we saw one. Now, I had a trinity of possible ritual objects. One had eroded from a part of the beach slowly deflating as the engineered earthwork done during restoration settles into a natural repose. My kids knew this was exciting, and I told them, "This is so amazing. There should only be three, maybe four, of these things, and we've found three!" The only thing that could mess it up, I said would be to find a bunch more.

So yeah, there were a bunch more.

It took just a minute or two to find the second. Then in rapid succession, a third, fourth, fifth,...the crestfallen quickly lose count. All of them are like the original two, cast stone finials, broken at the base, exact same size and shape, out of the same mold. Worse yet, they were with other rubble, including some concrete test cylinders, basically the most recent material at Mission Spit, part of the rubble component dumped after the road was built. Some pieces (upper left in this shot) have tar and asphalt stuck to them.

Even though I did also find a couple pieces of 19th Century glass in the same area, the odds that these artifacts were dumped a century after the Mission have jumped way up. There's no certainty to the context. Given that asphalt and concrete were visible on the surface a year ago before the restoration project even occurred, these things could be just a few decades old.

But wait a minute. It was almost exactly a year ago when we removed the "Tenino Stone," a fountain that I've also posted about before. At the time, I found concrete test cylinders around and under this thing, which turns out to be one of three fountains for Priest Point Park made (and given to the city) by the Hercules Quarry of Tenino in 1915. The shot above shows the fountain and the rubble; based on the location of the shovel probe at the right of the shot, this is about where I found the finials, although it's hard to be certain in a re-sculpted landscape.

So maybe, the cast stone was a decorative element of the fountain, or some other early Priest Point Park feature. (There I go, speculating again.) Once again, I cast this idea to the net in hopes that, once again, someone will know more of the history, or recognize the artifact, or otherwise help me move from speculation to knowledge.

Left Shoes Left Behind

A foot-long left foot's boot.

Among archaeologists, there is a tribe that will test the make-up of an artifact by tapping it against their teeth. Wood or bone or shell? Bark or rust or stone? Tap-tap-tap, and the sound will tell,...even for us older and deafer archaeologists, the difference in the vibration traveling up our teeth and into the maxilla and other cranial members yields a sense of what the material may be. Others are disgusted or afraid (and let's be honest, don't try this on a privy dig), but it can be effective.

Most of the time, the harder object, the sharper the sound, the better. Few objects of archaeological interest thump dully against enamel, because normally all that soft stuff rots away long before we arrive on the scene. The plink or ceramic or click of a lithic is welcome. Among the thunkier objects encountered by archaeologists are: deer poop, roots, rodent poop, crappy stone, goat poop, and wooden artifacts that once were beautiful, but are now just shapeless lumps.

At Mission Creek, though, and at many other places along the Salish Sea and its rivers, conditions conspire to preserve organics. Cool subterranean water flow keeps the ravages of oxidation at bay, and everything from pith to bark and bone to leather can remain fairly intact.

A "fairly intact" insole, once worn by a smaller left foot.

At the bottom of the dig at Mission Spit, we hit a layer of fart-smelling black goop, anaerobic and rich in organics. There were some pieces of cedar and cherry bark, as well as some worked timbers and bits of boots or shoes. As with the harder artifacts: a mix of native and foreign materials, a record of newcomers and persistence.

Interestingly, once into the layer of muck and organics, the ceramics and glass so common in the sandier sediment above disappeared. Shoes and axe-cut wood chips were plentiful enough to show that the Euro-American contingent had arrived, but as yet there were insufficient bottles and plates to become a noticable part of the archaeological record. On the other hand, shoes were dropping left and right (but mostly left, in this limited sample).

Other aspects of the site suggest that it dates to the Catholic Mission era, but may be the refuse of the associated Native community (not the Missionaries' house), and it's tempting to a curmudgeon like me to think that the wealth of shoes in the earliest level of the site signals a local rejection of introduced footwear. Were I a more political, post-modernist archaeologist, I might spin a tale of resistance from this trail of soles. But I am a simple man, who has noticed that shoes and boots tend to come loose in tidal mud, and it seems entirely likely that any number of shoes may have been lost by multiple nationalities stepping into or out of canoes and long boats at the spit where people landed when visiting the mission.

People never change

As if to prove that simple answers are best, on my last inspection of the Mission Creek outflow, I saw this Adidas sneaker, lost in a channel just a few months old.

The View Through High Windows

Imagine if you will (and really, you must, for I have no photos this time), that you are looking out of an Olympia window in 1850. The view may be across the bay to a ship dropping anchor a under a magnificent sky, or it may be fog clinging or rain striking the pane just a couple of millimeters away. Either way, you would be one of the first people looking outside through a window in these parts.

More committed historians than I probably know which of the original hovels had a glass window, and in what year light first entered a building here through anything other than an open door or the space in the longhouse roof planks where smoke flowed out. Thanks to Mrs. George Blankenship, writing a pioneer history in 1914, I know that one early set of windows was in the school started by the Catholic Missionaries. Not the first windows in this neck of the woods, but probably the first ones through which daydreaming students gazed at the South Sound sky.

How would I know that they were looking at the sky? Because Mrs. Blankenship noted that the windows were high on the walls, supposedly to prevent the kids from becoming distracted. I went to school 3,000 miles away and more than a century later, but this same trick of scholastic architecture was in force: put the windows high enough that kids at desks can't see much.

How long before the miracle of never-melting ice or solidified air (or whatever the Salish mind made of the first pane) became the underwhelming reality of broken glass? My guess is: during construction. Not that that matters. Even if the school-makers and then the students managed never to break a single pane, eventually the school and all the other Mission structures fell and their windows broke (though probably not in that order, there being both boys and rocks in Olympia from early on).

If you are an archaeologist interested in the birth of a building more than its demise, those broken windows come in handy. Because it turns out that in some lucky parts of the globe, the typical thickness of a pane of glass changed systematically over time. In fact, one of the best known chronologies comes from Fort Vancouver (in WA, not BC), a Hudsons Bay Company outpost that got going before Olympia, and for a while the source of nearly all non-Native goods purchased through a secondary HBC outpost at Nisqually, almost certainly including any window glass purchased for the Mission.

What David and Jennifer Chance documented during their Vancouver study was that over time, glass thickness increased. A couple of years later, Karl Roenke made the case for a broader Pacific Northwest window glass chronology. These two schemes for turning precise measurements of pane thickness into a calendar agree for the most part, increasing confidence in this method, at least within the region.

Ideally, the archaeologist working with window glass (OK, the lab tech stuck making measurements for days) will have thousands of pieces. At Mission Spit, we got just 69 pieces. A small sample size is vulnerable to attenuation and probably other stat-talk weaknesses that I do not understand, but which can throw off results or make it hard to see a pattern.

In this case, though, the limited sample still sets the clock to right about where we would expect.  It turns out that 2/3 (n=46) of the sample falls entirely within the date ranges established by the Chances and Roenke that correspond to the Mission occupation (AD 1848-1860).* If you include the chronologies' AD 1855-1885 period, which overlaps with but is not entirely within the Mission period, then over 85% of the window glass is in the expected age range. The mean, median, and modal thickness of the Mission Spit collection all fall in the 1840-1860 range of the chronologies.Three pieces are too thin to appear on the chronologies, and 4 are too thick; these may be flat pieces of bottles, rather than window glass.

So what? We already knew that the Mission was active from 1848-1860, and the glass merely agrees. But stand on the other side of the pane and take a look. First of all, there's the distribution. The chart above gives counts per period for the Chance & Chance chronology. Most of the glass is at the early end of the spread, as would be expected of a new Mission. But there is also a dropoff at the late end of the scale as well--there's nothing to suggest that occupation continued after the Missionaries left, and after their caretaker gave up interest a couple of years later.

The archaeological implication is that the salvaged Mission Spit deposit, scooped up with heavy machinery and virtually no vertical control over excavation, does not appear to be mixed with post-Mission cultural materials. Along with a few other observations, the window glass chronology for the site helps increase our confidence that we are dealing with a Mission period deposit, and not generations of subsequent settlement.


* Strictly speaking, some of the glass appears to be older than the Mission, but none of the tribal oral history or other written histories indicate that a building with windows would have been present anywhere nearby prior to the Mission. Maybe HBC was still selling off inventory from a shipment a few years prior?

Broken Glass, Everywhere

"Bang, broken like glass and plastic"  -Kurupt 2006
(or for old schoolers, "Broken glass everywhere" -Grandmaster Flash 1982)

No, the MG maker's mark is not a MF-in' typo, OK?!

Just name checking the Maywood Glass Company, of Compton, California, whose mark is the MG at the left. I heard that Dr. Dre's uncle worked there, maybe. Made a bottle that got drunk sometime during or after 1951 (so sayeth the "51" in the right-hand square), and ended up broken on a beach in Olympia. The stipply texture was known as Duraglas when it came out about a decade earlier.

Nothing but a coastal thing brought this gLAss up north, so I guess I cannot resort to my usual "globalization is older than you thought it was, you punk-ass kid" rant (as if punk-ass kids even gave a shit). Nor do I have any clue whether any of NWA's aggregate ancestry worked at Maywood Glass, so I cannot draw a line that runs straight outta Compton toward Olympia (one of the whitest cities in the US).

What I can do is thank bottle makers for putting their marks on the most durable part of bottles, and for bothering to code so much information in the first place. Besides the maker and the year, it's fairly common to have a plant code and a bottle style number. Maywood Glass followed the Owen-Illinois convention of reducing the year of manufacture to a number at the right (there was no Y2K panic over this, as far as I know).

Also, I can thank drunks for dropping so many bottles, and for insisting that they be shipped to the far corners of the earth in the first place. Where there are working men (or formerly working men), so there are alcohol bottles. Beer, gin, rum, wine,...these bottles trace the progress of Western civilization across the globe. A rock steady base line that can be read to trace trade and gin up chronologies. Once again, what appears to some as the downfall of society proves to be a windfall for archaeology.

So I pour out a sip for all the fallen homies, who left broken glass everywhere, and make archaeologists' jobs that much easier.

Ritual Objects

A "ritual object;" the bottom is broken, so it used to be a bigger, more impressive object.

One of the oldest jokes among archeologists (which is saying something), is that any artifact that cannot be identified is a "ritual object." On the most comical fringes of the…uh, "discipline" is not the right word, I guess,…but at and beyond the edges of what most archaeologists would recognize as their field, "ritual objects" become more and more common. There is something of an inverse relationship between the frequency with which the "ritual object" is invoked and the seriousness with which any other archaeologist takes said invoker. Like radical diffusionism, it's a gateway concept to the "aliens made it," school of "thought."

But the nature of archaeology is that we often do find things that are mysterious. Amongst ourselves, after a quick glance around to see that no civilians or Mormonist archaeologists are in earshot, we'll hold up a mystery artifact and proclaim it a "ritual object." And then laugh, before talking about who we might show it to that will come up with a real explanation.

This happened a couple of weeks ago at the Mission Spit screening session. After a brief and wishful suggestion that it might be coral (and thus, possible evidence of Hawaiians at the Mission/Tribal settlement), all we could say about the above-pictured object was that it did not look like local stone, it lacked wear indicative of use as an abrader or other tool, and that none of us had ever seen one.

So it became a ritual object.

The gods of archaeology move in mysterious ways, and after cleaning and drying the artifact, staring at it at different hours and in various states of mind, it struck me (while in a drinking beer with other archaeologists state of mind) that maybe it really could be a ritual object. As in, part of a Christian cross. After all, it was found in a beach-load of Mission detritus. After a week of showing it around, reaching consensus that the material is artificial cast stone and that it appeared to be decorative rather than functional, after gingerly suggesting to other archaeologists that it could be an actual ritual object (and getting no laughs, much less a better interpretation), I was pretty well on my way to becoming convinced.

But I know me, and I know that I am a sucker for reflexive irony, or whatever it is when the joke interpretation turns out to be exactly right, and so I didn't really go public. Skepticism is one of the few bedrock tenets of my ad hoc religion.

Then, this past Saturday, in the last bit of sediment to be screened, another one popped up. Same material, same shape and size, even the same breakage pattern. Hmm. Somewhere in the sand that we did not screen, either in the other material that was dumped as fill somewhere, or just maybe still in the part of the spit that was not dug up, I think there is another piece, the end of the third tip atop a cross. Here is my clumsy hypothetical reconstruction:

Two of the cross-topping trinity accounted for.

So yeah, there are just two of the four tips accounted for, but hey, have some faith. If you recognize these as part of a cross, or if you can debunk that theory, please let me know.

Breaking Good

No, not Heisenberg's product, just old broken glass.

People are often visibly non-plussed when they see what archaeologists get excited about. Here in the Northwest, there's hardly any gold, or carved statues, and no pyramids that I've heard of, but it goes beyond the absence of the charismatic mega-finds to the fact that even for the mundane things we find, a frag is often as good as a complete one.

Bottles are an instance of this, and the Mission Spit screening is shaping up to be a good example of the value of repeated mundanity. Every week, we find more shards (or is that sherds?), and never a complete bottle. This is why I could leave a heap of sediment in an un-guarded parking lot and not worry about bottle hunters stripping it clean.

On a desk, not a mantel.

There's no cash to be made with little pieces of glass, and nobody's gonna come over and admire a pile of it on your mantel. But an archaeologist will start picking up the pieces and holding them up to light, squinting in close, maybe run her fingers over the surface to see how it feels.

Any old sherd (or is it shard?) can tell you something. The aqua color of these frags, for instance, is something that disappeared by the 1920s (with some exceptions), and was more common in the 19th Century. Chronology derived from color is norotiously vague and prone to exceptions, but especially when you start amassing hundreds of pieces, it tends to become more certain. Occasionally, color might relate to a certain function, at least within a region, like the "black" glass of liquor bottles in Hudsons Bay assemblages, or the more recent Milk of Magnesia blue found in loggin camps.

Texture has a lot to say as well. There are all sorts of dimples and stipples, striations and stretch marks, marks of tools and indicating makers, and seams and scars that come from the few minutes of production and then stick around forever to tell the story. Hand blown, mold blown, machine made,...all of these technologies tell us something about the age, and maybe the origin, of the bottle. Now and then, we are lucky enough to find a bottle with the embossed name of the company, or product, or even date and location of manufacture; more often, we get part of that info, and must imagine the whole from which the part came.

If a bottle were to be shattered completely, and the archaeologist offered two pieces (or is it frag?), he'd want a piece of the base and another of the top, or "finish." The top and bottom of a bottle hold most of the clues (short of an embossed label on the mid-section) about the type of bottle and its age. Turn-molded, applied-lip,...these interpretations often derive from a piece of the base or heel, neck or finish.

Sure, it would be a lot simpler to come up with the age and function if there were entire bottles, but archaeologists almost never find that, and when they do, they're often as not in a privy (a soft landing in a pit o shit turns out to be great for preservation, but it's a steep price to pay in an area where every such feature is less than 150 years old). Even in a well-stocked logging camp dump, the occasional whole bottle is generally just redundant information already gleaned from the bases of a bunch of ketchup bottles (apparently, logging could be done without alcohol, but never withut ketchup).

It would be nicer, from an archaeologist's persepctive, if all of the bottles were shattered, no pristine trophies to lure looters, but plenty of bases and finishes to tell the story. I doubt if the regulators would go for it, but it's probably true that in cases where historic sites are being hit by bottle hunters, a few hours with a hammer would do as much to stop the looting as anything else. Breaking can be good.