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.

Vikings Everywhere (the non-pillaging kind): Screening Weeks 2 and 3

Beneath the two archaeologist hats are, in fact, two archaeologists. The beer box is a trickster, though, containing only artifacts.

Two more weeks of screening have passed, and the pile has shrunk, thanks to a couple of Viking invasions. It turns out that professors at Portland State and Western Washington--Viking mascotted schools, both of 'em--are so dedicated that they'll spend a Saturday driving to Olympia so that their students can experience some hands-on archaeology. It also turns out that oldsters' fears are unfounded, seeing that a dozen or more college kids are willing to hit the road before 8AM to work,...for free, being sprayed with icy water for four hours, in cold damp weather, to find...broken glass. Along with the Vikings, there were Geoducks from Evergreen, and Clippers from South Puget Sound, even a, uh,..."Clans-woman" doesn't sound right, and that angry mustachio'd Scotty Dog McFogg is not recognizable to Americans, so let's just say a Simon Fraser grad student.

So instead of the half dozen committed geeks huddled over a few screens that I expected, there have been a couple dozen people for each of the last two weeks. Students working with their profs, with archaeologists both employed and avocational, people who have been doing this for a few years or a few decades sharing screens with the next generation. "Good eye...nope, just a rock...the middle of that rusty concretion looks like a mchine cut nail..." and eventually an "Oh wow!" that brings over people from other screens, or goes on tour with its finder. It's good for us old guys to work with people for whom this is all new. Questions keep us on our toes, and watching as eyes see things for the first time is rejuvenating.

I'd say more than half the pile has been sifted at this point, and the Wow finds and their more mundane companions are beginning to pile up. Everybody finds something, and even if any one piece of glass may not thrill, everyone is getting some experience in a pretty stress-free situation. No stratigraphy to interpret, no bulldozers idling at the edge of the pit, no obligation to write a report (except for me, I guess, but I have this feeling that  volunteers will emerge for that phase, too). Just spray, look, and pull out the artifacts. Even from quarter-inch screens, students and vets alike are coming up with small pieces, including things that could easily have passed through.

And the aggregated frags add up to data. The more there is, the more solid the report can be, the more likely we can say something and back it up. (Not that I'm against saying things with no evidence whatsoever; it's just nice to not always be winging it.) Also, as the numbers mount, so do the odds of finding the rarity that says something really interesting.

So I'm glad and grateful that the  hordes have appeared for two weeks running. Far from the stereotypical pillaging Vikings, they're contributing. At odds with the sleeping in after a night of riotous partying charicature of college students, they're learning and helping.