"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.

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.