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!

 

Featured Artifact

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 cataloging. 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.

 

Featured Artifact

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 ware types 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.

 

Featured Artifacts and Lab Update

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.