Tag Archives: Research Update

Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project at Society for California Archaeology Meeting!

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The Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project Symposium Presenters! Photo by Yucaipa Kwock.

Hi everyone,

This past weekend (March 8-10) the Society for California Archaeology (SCA) held their annual conference in Berkeley, CA.

As part of the conference, project director Dr. Barbara Voss and collection manager Megan S. Kane organized a symposium entitled:  Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project:  Ten Years of Community-Based Research on an Overseas Chinese Collection

This symposium served as a space for various project participation to reflect on the progress made in its last 10 years, the directions currently being explored and as an opportunity to solicit feedback and input from the California archaeological community and the public. The SCA’s were an especially appropriate venue for this reflection, as it was at their annual meetings in 2004 that the first Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project symposium was held as part of the initial project launch!

From 8:45am to 12pm, a variety of project participants presented 12 minute papers on various facets of the Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project. Presenters ranged from those most recently brought on to the project, to those involved from the start, archaeologists and non-archaeologists, undergraduate and graduate students, professionals, professors and more! The papers presented were well received and the symposium was very well attended, with the audience spilling out into the hallway for almost the entire time.

In addition, later that evening our project partner, Chinese Historical and Cultural Project (CHCP) received the Helen C. Smith Avocational Society Award from the Society for California Archaeology! This award is given annually “to a California avocational archaeology society, club, group or individual belonging to such an entity who has shown outstanding leadership in the field of cultural resources management.” Lillian Gong-Guy, Anita Wong Kwock and Yucaipa Kwock were there to receive the award on behalf of CHCP. Congratulations to CHCP on receiving this award!

Anita Wong Kwock and Lillian Gong-Guy are presented the Helen C. Smith Avocational Society Award from SCA by Barb Voss. Photo by Yucaipa Kwock.

To give everyone a taste, listed below is the description of and program for the symposium. Scroll to the bottom of this post for a photo gallery of the symposium, the banquet dinner and CHCP receving their award. All photos courtesy of Yucaipa Kwock.

Thank you to the symposium organizers, project participants, and to all the presenters for making this Market Street event such a big hit, and congratulations to CHCP!

 

Symposium 5 Program

Title:Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project: Ten Years of Community Based Research on an Overseas Chinese Collection

Organizers: Barbara L. Voss and Megan S. Kane

Symposium Description

In 1985-1988, San Jose’s first Chinatown was rapidly excavated during urban redevelopment. Despite being described as the most significant assemblage of Overseas Chinese artifacts in North America, the collection was only minimally studied before being stored in a municipal warehouse. In Fall 2002, Stanford University, Chinese Historical and Cultural Project, History San Jose, and Environmental Science Associates formed the Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project to catalog, analyze, and publish this remarkable collection. This 10th anniversary symposium presents current research and public outreach programs, and explores new directions for the next stages of the project.

Presentations:

8:45 Introduction: Reflections on Ten Years of Collaborative Research, Education, and Public Archaeology Programs on the Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project
Barbara L. Voss

9:00 The Chinese Community in Santa Clara Valley – Chinese Historical & Cultural Project (CHCP) of Santa Clara County, Inc. (1987)
Anita Wong Kwock and Lillian Gong-Guy

9:15 The Public Archaeology Events of the Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project
Guido Pezzarossi

9:30 City Beneath the City: Market Street Chinatown San Jose Art Installation – Giving Public Voice and Visibility to A Buried History
Rene Yung

9:45 Art/facts: Challenging Archaeological Presentation in the “City Beneath the City”
Kyle Lee-Crossett

10:00 Exhibits and Events: Ethnographic Observations of the Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project
Meghan E. Gewerth

10:30 Reconstructing the Context of an Orphaned Collection: a Case Study of the Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project
Megan S. Kane

10:45 Worth a Thousand Words: Transfer Prints from the Market Street Chinatown Collection
Stephanie K. Chan

11:00 Fan and Tsai: Food, Identity, and Global Connections in the Market Street Chinatown
Ryan Kennedy

11:15 Starch and Residues on Market Street Chinatown Artifacts
Sheahan Bestel and Fanya Becks

11:30 Food, Diet, and Health in Market Street Chinatown, San Jose: Microscopic and Macroscopic Evidence 
Linda Scott Cummings, Kathryn Puseman, Chad Yost, and Peter Kováčik

Discussant:
Rebecca Allen

Photo Gallery (All photos by Yucaipa Kwock).

Preliminary Results of Bottle Residue Study

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Hi everyone!

We have an exciting update on the very first results from the Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project’s Glass Bottle Residue Pilot Project.

In January, the project shipped 15 glass bottles (of different shapes and sizes) that at one time likely contained beer, liquor, Euro-American patent medicines, traditional Chinese medicines, personal hygiene or grooming products. Many of these bottles are of distinctive shapes associated with certain types of products (see here for examples), while some are embossed with the name of the either the manufacturer, the name of the product it contained, and/or the purveyor, all of which (with the help of guides or archival research) can provide clues as to what the bottle contained at the time of its purchase and use.

However, what do we do when we have a glass bottle, but no embossing or mark? What if the vessel form does not provide clues as to what it held? Even when we have embossing and information on what the bottle contained at the start of its circulation within the Market Street Chinatown, how can we find out what exactly those products were made from? Finally, when emptied of their original contents, how can we find out if these bottles were reused for different purposes than they were made to fulfill?

One way of addressing these questions is through various forms of residue analysis employed by archaeological scientists! In January, Marguerite De Loney, a Stanford PhD student in Archaeology working with the project, pulled 15 glass bottles from the Market Street collection with some type of residue -sometimes powdery, sometimes liquid- still inside of them. These bottles were sent to the University of Idaho Department of Analytical and Environmental Chemistry, where Dr. Ray von Wandruszka and collaborators are carrying out a pilot analysis project of the residues in these bottles in order to identify what was in them, and/or how they were being used at the time of their disposal.

While this project is just getting started, we have some preliminary results on the contents of one large, brown bottle (see pictures below). As you can tell from the photos, the bottle is embossed with “San Jose Bottling Co. C. Maurer.”

Documentary research by Dr. von Wandruszka has determined that it is likely a beer bottle, made for the Fredericksburg Brewery of San Jose (1867-1918; see here and here for blog posts about the history of this brewery) by C. Maurer (later C. Maurer and Sons) San Jose Bottling, Co. (see here for PDF of 1905 San Jose Directory that lists C. Maurer and Sons Bottling Company).

This is where things get REALLY interesting: As you can tell from the photos, the bottle still has its original, resealable porcelain closure in place. What you CAN’T tell from the photos, is that this bottle contained a decent amount of thick, slightly cloudy, viscous fluid that was contained by the closure and preserved for at least 126 years! Could this be the last unwanted sip of a historic San Jose local brew?!

Well, not exactly. Dr. von Wandruszka sampled this fluid and determined a few things: It’s combustible, soluble in hexane, and infrared spectroscopy analysis (one of the best analytical techniques for organic residues of this type) has determined that it is made up of fatty acids and/or esters. In other words, this fluid is NOT beer but most likely cooking fat! While they are still trying to determine if it is vegetable or animal fat (they are betting on animal fat), what is clear is that someone at the Market Street acquired this bottle, possibly drank its contents, and then kept it and its useful resealable closure around as a way to store leftover cooking fat rendered from pork or other meats prepared in the kitchen!

These early results really bring home the point that archaeological sciences, in tandem with documentary research can provide us with a much more complete picture of the way in which everyday things were acquired, used, and re-used by the inhabitants of the Market Street Chinatown. It forces archaeologists to consider the extended lifecycles of common (but durable and useful) things like bottles and stoneware food storage vessels that may have been put to creative uses long after their original contents (be it beer, wine or pickled foods) were gone.

Now THIS is how you start a pilot project out with a bang! Stay tuned for more updates and thanks for reading!

 

Thanks to Dr. Ray von Wandruszka and Dr. Barbara Voss for contributing the content for this post.