Things have seemed fairly quiet in the lab this spring and summer; now that the course CASA 103/203 has come to an end and the lab is no longer filled with students anxiously scrambling through boxes of artifacts to find materials to analyze for their projects. Throughout Spring Quarter, I have worked as a research assistant in the lab, helping Bryn out with the project he is working on for his dissertation; this has mostly entailed additional artifact cataloging and analysis. While I have come across beads, buttons, and other small finds, my efforts have primarily been devoted to glass analysis. I have worked with a wide range of glass materials, ranging from glass tumblers to window glass sherds, but most of the identifiable glass I have catalogued seems to have come from bottles of some sort. In particular, I have found many fragments from alcoholic-beverage bottles, and even a few bottles that are almost entirely intact. To the best of my ability, I have attempted to identify the origins and contents of these bottles. I plan on spending even more time with such vessels in the upcoming weeks, as I assist Professor Voss in conducting research for her project on alcohol consumption practices at the Market Street site. Among the most interesting finds I have come across in my cataloging are fragments from two tiny glass cups, which appear to have been egg cups. One of the cups is nearly complete, and both cups are made of transparent glass and bear the same pattern of engraved stars. They seem to match each other and might have come from a set. Does anyone know anything more about these cups?

This wine bottle was another particularly striking find. Although it is highly fragmented, most of its pieces were successfully recovered. One of its 21 fragments bears a maker’s mark that reads “ED. PERNOD COUVET.” Upon hunting around for the origins of this mark, I discovered that it was probably the mark of the Pernod Fils Factory that operated in Couvet, Switzerland in the 19th century. The Pernod family was especially known for absinthe production and ran factories in both Switzerland and France. Edouard Pernod was the eldest son in the family and took over the Couvet factory in 1827, transferring it to his own name.

This artifact is especially significant as it might elucidate details on trade networks and economic patterns in the Market Street site: was wine a commodity that was imported from European manufacturers in bulk to merchants and stores internal to the site? Or, conversely, was this one bottle a rarity that represented a gift or purchase from an outside supplier? It will be interesting to see if more bottles with maker’s marks associated with the same manufacturer turn up.

Hi! My name is Madeleine “Bear” Douglas, and I am a second-year undergraduate student here at Stanford University double majoring in Archaeology and Economics. I decided to take this class because although I am an archaeology major, until now I had no practical experience with analyzing a collection. I thought I could learn a lot from a lab class in preparation for my studies later on and for this summer, when I will be on a dig in Çatalhöyük, Turkey. It has been a privilege to work with the materials from the San José Market Street Collection, and I hope that my project, on oral hygiene and toothbrush technology in the Market Street Chinatown, will be of interest and maybe of use to some of you.

Now that the quarter is coming to an end, everyone in the class is logging extra hours in the lab, pulling out and cataloging artifacts relevant to their projects, taking measurements, and checking historical references. As part of our projects, each of us will be making a presentation to the class on our research and our findings. To help us make more effective presentations, and also to teach us an important part of data management in archaeology, this week we learned about archaeological photography. Our guest lecturer, Jason Quinlan, taught us all a great deal about what goes into taking a good artifact photograph. First, you have to choose what aspect of the artifact you want to come through in the photograph: what is interesting or special about it? For example, if you want to emphasize the texture on an object, or some sort of engraving on its surface, using oblique lighting to cast a slight shadow will help that texture come out. If the object is smooth, you may not want to create those shadows. One of the most important things about archaeological photographs is scale. In every photograph, it is important to include a scale (a piece of paper or wood with length markings) in order to show the artifact’s size. Otherwise, it would be easy to think a huge urn could fit in the palm of your hand! We experimented in lab with photographing some of our artifacts, altering the aperture and shutter speed on the cameras to see the different effects of the change in lighting. This week’s artifact of the week served as our guinea pig- you can see the result below.

I found this week’s featured artifact bagged up in a box with some other small bone finds while I was searching for toothbrushes to analyze for my project. It is an ivory handled jackknife about 10 cm long with a blade that corroded while partially unfolded. The handle is engraved on both sides with a raised diamond pattern in the center and crosswise marks on the side. I was struck by the quality of the craftsmanship on the handle and by how well preserved it was. A knife like this would have been very expensive, and was probably a prized possession of the person who lost it.

Hi! My name is Jessica Yuan, and I’m a sophomore who is about to declare a major in Cultural and Social Anthropology. After taking an introductory course to archaeology last quarter, I was itching to put my new theoretical knowledge on archeological concepts and techniques to use. When the opportunity to enroll in Professor Voss’ class on laboratory methodology in archaeology arose, I signed up eagerly, knowing it would be the perfect venue for me to explore my interest in archaeology further and gain substantial hands-on experience in analyzing historical artifacts. I have gotten much more than I bargained for: in addition to acquiring skills in the identification, analysis, and cataloging of a wide array of materials, ranging from ceramics to lithics, I have also learned much on the history of overseas Chinese in the San Jose area. As my own family’s legacy is one of immigration from China to California, I found much of the contextual information of the Market Street Artifact Collection especially relevant to my understanding of my own family heritage.

This past week marked the eighth that our class has spent with the Market Street Chinatown Artifact Collection, and we are becoming more and more adept at classifying different archaeological materials. Our focus this week has been on recognizing faunal and floral remains and drawing various analyses and interpretations from them. As a class, we got an opportunity to try our hand at zooarchaeology, learning some of the fundamentals of skeletal anatomy and bone structure, in addition to different methods of collecting descriptive, primary data and interpretive, secondary data. We learned how through studying weathering and abrasion patterns or calculating MNI (Minimum Number of Individuals) values, archaeologists can make inferences about ages, genders, and frequencies of various animals, which allow for interpretations into patterns of culture and activity of the past. Following a lecture on Tuesday, the class spent Thursday in a practicum setting, examining botanical and faunal materials. By studying seeds and various fragments of bone and shell, we were able to gain some insight into the lifeways of people of the past. Friday was open lab day, in which students each worked on the individual research projects they have been developing throughout the quarter, which address topics as diverse as hygiene practices, conceptions of childhood, and household religious activity in the Market Street Chinatown.

With its delicately painted pink cheeks and black hair, this Frozen Charlotte doll that Rachel discovered when searching through a storage box immediately caught my attention. Measuring only 3.73 cm in length, this porcelain doll was one of many mass-produced in Germany between 1860 and 1900. These tiny dolls, which typically ranged in length from one to four inches, were widely popular throughout the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, perhaps because as “penny dolls,” their low price made them well-suited for children’s toy collections. The doll was named after the title character in the William Lorenzo Carter folk ballad “Fair Charlotte,” which sings the tragic story of a beautiful young bride who freezes to death on a winter sleigh ride with her husband after refusing to warm herself with a blanket. The presence of these Frozen Charlottes in the Market Street Chinatown attests not only to the presence of children within the community, but also to a degree of acculturation to Western practices and adoption of Western commodities.

Welcome, dear readers, my name is Megan Kane. I am a senior/master’s student in the Archaeology Center at Stanford. Having studied primarily prehistory for the last three and a half years, I thought it would be very interesting to learn about more historical archaeology, so I find myself taking CASA 203. I must confess that I never cease to be amazed by the level of detail that historical archaeologists can achieve in their studies. The kind of resolution we prehistorians rarely even dream of! Outside of my growing jealousy, I am learning a great deal about the process of cataloging and analyzing artifacts in the lab. Our time in the lab this week was split between two tasks: learning about lithics and small finds and searching for the artifacts that we will be working with in our projects. The topic of “Lithics and Small Finds” is a very broad one, and I found myself examining everything from prehistoric grinding stones, or manos, to opium pipe bowls. During lecture we discussed the various techniques employed in stone tool production, various striking methods for flaked lithics and how to identify production steps, later putting all of this to practice in the lab. The category of small finds includes many personal objects, like buttons, beads, pipes, etc. Having worked with period and vintage costuming in the past, I was particularly struck by the buttons we examined in the lab. It is amazing that, as an archaeologist, I can hold in my hand a small and a very personal part of someone’s life, like a shirt button or a pipe.

During the lab session on Friday, all of us began the mad scramble to find the artifacts that we will study in our research projects about the Market Street Chinatown. The lab table was quickly swamped as we searched catalogs, excavation reports and boxes for everything from toothbrushes and dolls to storage jars and glass bottles! My own research is focused on household and small scale religious practices in the Chinatown, a scarcely studied topic, and I am quickly discovering why this topic has rarely been touched on in previous studies of overseas Chinese communities! The types of religious practices performed in homes most likely included the burning of incense and food offerings to the gods and ghosts, activities which are either invisible archaeologically or indistinguishable from more secular activities. So it has been very hard to identify a class of objects in the Chinatown collection that might be associated with such practices. But I have stumbled upon several examples of oil lamps and candleholders, which might have been used during such household rituals. Now comes the arduous task of finding all the examples of these artifacts in the dozens and dozens of boxes and analyzing them!

This week’s artifact of the week is a small glass bottle that Stephanie is analyzing for her project. The bottle is aqua tinted glass, about 16.5 cm tall, embossed with “Lyon’s / Kathairon / For the Hair / New York.” The bottle is perfectly intact with a none too subtle proclamation of its original contents, a hair tonic. According to a period advertisement (see image), Lyon’s Kathairon was meant do just about everything, to cure baldness, to curl hair, to calm the scalp, and to reduce dandruff! This little bottle is a window not only into hair care and personal hygiene in the Market Street Chinatown, it might also reveal information about the ideals of personal appearance and the use of Anglo products by the Chinese overseas community.

Hello, my name is Rachel, and I am a graduate student in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology. I decided to take CASA 203 Lab Methods class, as coming from a different disciplinary background, the class offers the learning of skills I need to acquire! Although my research is in Ghana, West Africa, I view these techniques and methods as highly transferable. I have thoroughly enjoyed working with these artifacts – the tangible nature of these objects brings history alive. I am very grateful to the Chinese Historical and Cultural Project and the community for allowing me to participate in this fascinating project. Thank you.

This week we turned from glass analysis to metals. Metals are interesting since depending on their composition they change in appearance with time: copper and copper alloys develop a green patina, silver and pewter turns black or dark grey, iron and iron alloys develop a red corrosion, and white metals (lead, tin, aluminum and zinc) develop a white or grey patina. We didn’t examine gold, but this does not corrode. Some of the objects we examined were: jewelry, bolts, nails (and more nails!), a pencil top, buttons, a suspender holder and what I thought looked like a door handle! On Friday, we worked on our own individual research projects in which we analyze objects from the collection. To that end, I went with Bryn to the storage to look for something to research. Wow! So many boxes! I was thrilled to find – in the first box I examined – a watch and some pieces of broken dolls. I also discovered a minature doll, that Professor Voss tells me is called a ‘Frozen Charlotte’. Well, it was a tough decision between the watch and the dolls, but the latter won! I am really looking forward to learning more about children and childhood in Market Street Chinatown.

The artifact of the week is my unexpected discovery – a Prosser button. I thought this was rather exciting since it was inside the base fragment of a green bottle probably used to hold alcohol. The button was not catalogued which meant that we had to create a record for it. White in color, with a glassy appearance, in actuality, it was only half of a button, yet one can see a distinct design around the edges. Made of high fired clays, these buttons were manufactured in several styles between 1850 and 1920. Although small in size, buttons are interesting and can tell us a lot about the past; they are good indicators of gender, economic status and activities of a site’s occupants.

Hi! My name is Jocelyn Brabyn, and I’m a third-year undergraduate majoring in Cultural and Social Anthropology here at Stanford University. I enrolled in Professor Voss’ class on archaeological laboratory methods on a whim, but I am finding myself increasingly enthralled by the subject, and have felt inspired by my time in the lab to spend my summer working on a dig in the field. This class is my first encounter with archaeology, and coming from a family of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts, I can’t help but compare it to sleuthing. When I enter the lab, I cease to be a mere frazzled undergraduate, and I become a private investigator, inspecting, deducing, categorizing, and extrapolating. Needless to say, I find it fascinating!

This week we transitioned from ceramics to glass. On Tuesday, Professor Voss explained to us exactly how to formulate our research questions for the projects we will be completing individually. On Thursday we each turned in our preliminary research proposals, and it’s already evident from the brainstorm we had with Professer Voss on Tuesday that my classmates’ projects promise to be very exciting indeed! Following the workshop was Professor Voss’ lecture on glass, where we touched on everything from “black” glass to “milk” glass, kick-ups to collars, dip-molds to the automatic bottle machine. On Thursday we put our new knowledge to practical use in the lab, where we did various exercises identifying manufacturing methods on glass artifacts. I even learned the difference between an embossed manufacturer’s mark and a pontil scar—turns out they’re pretty different!

The artifact of the week comes from Friday’s lab section, which marked our transition into glass as we finished up the ceramic remains we had been cataloguing. It comes from the Asian stoneware I had been working on last week, rather than the new glasses we are just breaking into (not literally!). It’s a fragment from a very large globular storage jar probably used for shipping or transport, because it has lugs on the shoulder to secure a lid. I had never seen lugs before, and Professor Voss said it was unusual to find them intact like that. This is an exceptionally thick rim sherd, weighing in at over half a kilogram, indicating that the complete vessel must have been very large indeed, housing contents on a fairly massive scale.

Hi, my name is Stephanie Cruz. As a junior majoring in Anthropological sciences, I thought that taking CASA 103 the Laboratory Methods class would be beneficial in helping me learn skills applicable to the field and lab, but I had no idea that this class would also teach me so much about local history. Through CASA 103 I’ve grown better acquainted with the area in the short span of four weeks than I had in almost two and a half years. Much of this is due to our background reading assigned to us each week on some aspect of Chinatown life, as well as guest speakers and a field trip to modern day Market Street.

Most recently we were graciously visited by Connie Young Yu, the author of Chinatown, San Jose, USA. Ms. Young Yu recounted stories from her book and also from her own childhood and background. She described the Chinese immigrant experience using examples which her own grandparents struggled through, like finding jobs and very explicit threats. Ms Young Yu also mentioned the imbedded prejudices in place against Asians as late as the 1930s, when her father was ostracized from finding a job, even with a Stanford engineering degree. Later on in the week, the class ventured into San Jose. We visited History Park San Jose and the Ng Shing Gung, which means "Temple of Five Gods”, a historic recreation of the Heinlenville cultural and religious center built in 1888. Here we met Monica Tucker, who gave us the tour across the temple and explained how the various artifacts of the collection were incorporated into exhibit. We saw what people previous to us had cleaned, sorted, and catalogued presented to us in neat glass cases, which gave me a real sense as to how we were contributing to Chinese History commemoration.

The artifact of the week or artifacts of the week as the case may be, are three marbles (artifacts 85-32-24-111, 85-31-24-108, and 85-31-24-107). I chose these because I thought they represented a part of community life that is often overlooked: children at play. While I may not be 100% sure that these marbles belonged to children, they do suggest it. In particular I thought these marbles exemplified the cautious care and attention to detail that many artifacts in the collection exhibit. In particular artifact 85-32-24-111 which has small leaf decorations is especially appealing, not just as a toy but as an example of careful craftsmanship.

In January we began the third iteration of Prof. Barbara Voss's Laboratory Methods in Archaeology course, in which students learn laboratory analysis techniques by cataloging and studying archaeological material from the Market Street Chinatown in San Jose, California. My name is Josh Samuels, and I'm privileged to be the course's Teaching Assistant this year. I’m a graduate student in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford. The bulk of my archaeological experience comes from excavations at the Iron Age site of Monte Polizzo in western Sicily, in addition to Cultural Resource Management work in Arizona and California. My current research interests center on land reform in Sicily, with a focus on the agricultural villages built by the Fascist government in the 20s, 30s, and 40s.

Prof. Voss began this year’s Laboratory Methods course on January 9, 2007, with an introductory lecture about the role of laboratory analysis in the archaeological process, and an introduction to the San Jose Market Street Chinatown Archaeological Project. In the weeks that followed, we reconvened for lectures on ceramic analysis, including the physical attributes of ceramics, common waretypes and vessel forms, and the different ways that archaeologists “count” ceramics. The class has been practicing its ceramic identification skills during the Thursday lab sessions, and on Fridays Bryn Williams, the project Research Assistant, has been guiding everyone through the cataloguing system and getting us all started on cataloging and analyzing ceramic sherds. This year we're focusing on cataloging material from Lot 86-36, which consists of artifacts from the northern portion of the Market Street Chinatown site.

From the first day of laboratory work, we encountered ceramic vessels that we had never seen before in the Market Street Chinatown collection. We are featuring two of them here. The first is a porcelaneous stoneware bowl with a green-tinted glaze. The exterior rim is decorated with a green pattern applied with a stencil or rouletting wheel. On the interior, the base of the bowl is only partially glazed, and this seems to have been intentional as the glaze is absent from a circle that encloses a diamond shape.

The second featured artifact is a porcelain bowl decorated with underglaze blue hand-painted designs, possibly some kind of plant motif. Do any of you recognize these unusual decorative patterns? We’ve not been able to find any examples of them in our reference library. Please leave a comment here or email me at jsamuels@stanford.edu if you have any suggestions.

This has been a year of exciting news and big developments with the Market Street Chinatown Archaeological Project. At the beginning of the academic year we moved into a new lab. Located in the new archaeology building at Stanford University, this lab is a cutting-edge research facility in the heart of campus. This building includes space for artifact storage and analysis as well as room for our research library and multimedia equipment. Anybody interested in a tour of the new facility can e-mail us at bryn@stanford.ed to arrange a visit.

In other news, Professor Voss and Bryn Williams have organized a panel on overseas Chinese archaeology for this January's Society for Historical Archaeology annual meeting in Sacramento. The Society for Historical Archaeology is the largest professional organization of historical archaeologists in the world. With participants from the United States, Australia and New Zealand, this panel will bring together archaeologists studying Overseas Chinese communities from around the globe. Research about Chinese communities in San Jos� will feature prominently in this panel. It will be exciting to discuss the history and archaeology of the Market Street Chinatown with such a diverse group of international scholars

2005 has started off with a bang in terms of the research we�ve been working on and presenting regarding the Market Street Chinatown! During the first week of January, I (Stacey) traveled to York, England, to present a paper Bryn and I co-authored entitled �Contesting Hollywood�s Chinatowns: An Archaeological Perspective on Early Overseas Chinatowns in Nineteenth Century America.� We received great feedback on it and will be revising it for a book on �Hollywood�s� representations of the past. A draft of our conference presentation will be posted on this website soon, so make sure to check back in a few days for it!

On behalf of Barb, Bryn, and myself, I�d like to thank everyone that attended our Archaeology Workshop held on January 20th at Stanford University�s Archaeology Center. In it, we discussed both the work we�ve done on the project and the work we hope to complete in the upcoming years. We were so pleased with the amazing turnout and the great comments and suggestions we received during the question and answer session.

A few weeks after our workshop, Bryn left for China and is quickly becoming fluent in Chinese. He�s enjoying his time in China and sends a big hello to everyone back in the states. I am also pleased to announce that a few new volunteers have been joining Erica and me in the lab. Arana, a first year Ph.D. student in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, and Beth, a volunteer from the Bay Area, have been helping us catalogue glass from Feature 18. They have been a great and welcome help!

Greetings once again from Stacey. The lab has been quite busy this past autumn quarter. Erica Simmons, a senior Archaeology major who worked on the Market Street Chinatown Project last year, has been volunteering her spare time in the lab since September. She has been a great help, and in just a short time, finished cataloguing a large portion of the glass from Feature 18. In the meantime, I have continued to catalogue buttons from the entire assemblage.

This month I also had the opportunity to catalogue and photograph the artifacts on display at History San J�se. History San J�se�s Melissa Johnson and Monica Tucker were extremely helpful in assisting me with this task. They were kind enough to lend me the museum�s photography studio, where the photograph to the left was taken.

This week�s featured artifact is currently on display at History San J�se�s reconstructed Ng Shing Gung temple. According to the Asian American Comparative Collection�s (AACC) terminologies, this vessel is a �liquor warmer.� It could have also been used as a teapot or sauce-serving bottle. Its decoration is commonly known as �Sweet Pea,� but is also sometimes called �Plant with Central Flower,� �Shanghai Ware,� or �Simple Flower.�

We have finally returned to the lab after a summer of thought-provoking archaeological work at the Presidio. We ended the 2003-2004 year with a visit to History San Jose�s Family Day, where we (Bryn, Liz, and Stacey) were able share a few of the many fascinating artifacts from the Market Street Chinatown Archaeological Project with the public. We are currently in the process of mapping out project goals for the 2004-2005 academic year. Two goals that remain a priority are obtaining outside funding for the project and continuing to catalogue the enormous assemblage of artifacts from the Market Street Chinatown.

During the 2004-2005 school year, Stacey Camp will be joining Professor Voss as the Market Street Chinatown�s research assistant. Stacey worked with the collection last year as a student in Professor Voss� lab methods course and wrote a corresponding essay analyzing the spatial relationship between gaming artifacts found in the Market Street Chinatown collection. This year, she plans to continue cataloguing artifacts possibly related to gaming.

Thanks to the hard work of last year�s research assistants, Liz Clevenger and Bryn Williams, and Professor Voss, the 2003-2004 report is finished! And, as of last Friday, the second annual project progress report has been mailed out. It can be downloaded from this site in .pdf format at http://marketstreet.stanford.edu/archives/Progress_Rep_03-04.pdf.