My name is Erica Simmons, and I am a junior majoring in archaeology. The content of this class is new to me, so I have learned a lot about lab analysis in historical archaeology. The past couple of weeks, we have been analyzing a large and diverse collection of ceramics. It was fun to learn to identify so many different kinds of ceramics, and there are some great artifacts. Next week we will finish up with ceramics and start to study glass. We have also been brainstorming what to study for our research projects this quarter. There have been some really exciting ideas. I am still trying to decide what to research, since there are so many interesting things to learn!

On Saturday we took a class field trip to San Jose to visit the site where Market Street Chinatown was located. It was hard to imagine the community on a space that is so different today. I found it really exciting to be there and to be able to connect all the artifacts we’ve been studying to a specific place. I also got a better sense of the area bordering the Chinatown. Then we went to the reconstructed Ng Shing Gung temple in the San Jose Historical Park. It was beautiful inside, and had some great display items, like a decorated lion’s head for parades. We also visited History San Jose and got a glimpse of their large collection of items from San Jose’s past. I want to thank Anita Kwock and Alida Bray for showing us around History San Jose and the Ng Shing Gung temple. It was a wonderful experience!

Featured Artifact

These three sherds are from an oil lamp. They fit together and are highly burned on the inside. I found this particularly interesting, because it was one of the few ceramic artifacts I saw that was not involved in food storage or consumption. It reminded me that we use objects for a wide range of activities. I had not thought about how people lighted their homes.

My name is Stacey Camp and I am a first year archaeology Ph.D. student in Stanford’s Cultural and Social Anthropology Department. I have learned so much about historical archaeology lab methods in the past three weeks! Thanks to Professor Voss’ and Bryn’s guidance, I can now accurately analyze, identify, and catalogue artifacts from the Market Street Chinatown. The wide variety and large quantity of this collection’s artifacts continues to amaze me. The quality of the Market Street Chinatown’s artifacts has likewise impressed me. This Four Seasons porcelain cup I catalogued two weeks ago was just one of the many artifacts that caught my eye. Rarely does an archaeologist get the opportunity to work with such a large collection of completely intact artifacts such as this cup.

Dr. Rebecca Allen from Past Forward, Inc., was kind enough to come speak to our class this past Tuesday. Her lecture gave us a vivid picture of the bustling bachelor community at the Woolen Mills Chinatown. She also shed light on the Heilenville Chinatown, a community of families that developed after the Market Street Chinatown burnt down. As a budding historical archaeologist, I personally found Dr. Allen’s lecture extremely informative; she thoroughly explained the process of developing a research project and the methods involved in conducting historical and archaeological research. She also offered her assistance to any students interested in developing research projects associated with the Woolen Mills Chinatown. Our Thursday lab class was equally enthralling; Professor Voss and Bryn taught us how to analyze and identify the form and function of various vessels.

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These sherds most likely originate from what was once a large storage vessel made of Asian stoneware. I was particularly intrigued by the small, raised black dots on these two sherds. After discussing the find with Professor Voss, I learned that these raised spots are drops of glaze that were splattered onto the vessel for unknown reasons. Professor Voss said this was the first time she has seen such spots. These sherds share the same catalogue number as the rim sherds photographed above, though they may represent two unrelated vessels. The rim sherds demonstrate the enormous size of some of the Market Street Chinatown’s storage vessels.

My name is Bryn Williams, and I am the teaching assistant for the laboratory methods class this year. When I took the course as a student last year I knew that Professor Voss and Ezra (the previous TA) did quite a bit of work behind the scenes to prepare for the course, but I never knew exactly what they did. For every hour of class there are at least two hours of preparation. Artifact catalog sheets need to be printed, the ceramics artifacts we are having the students catalog need to be rough-sorted into feature numbers, supplies need to be ordered, the artifact database needs to be checked, and these are just some of the tasks from the first two weeks. Being a TA for this course is giving me an inside view of the kind of work involved in running an archaeology lab. Even though there has been a lot of work, it has all been fun and productive. Being a TA for this project has only increased my interest in the Market Street site in particular, and the archaeological process in general.

It is only the second week of lab methods class, and the students have already started to catalog ceramic artifacts from the 86-36 collection. We began the week on Tuesday with a lecture on ceramics. Professor Voss briefly discussed how ceramics are made and decorated, and then went into detail about the different ceramics we are likely to encounter in the 86-36 collection. On Thursday the students in the class put concepts from the Tuesday lecture into practice. Professor Voss and I set up trays of ceramics for students to work with. Some of the trays asked the students to identify the types of ceramics on the tray, others displayed ceramics with makers marks and asked the students to identify those makers marks using reference books in the lab. An example of one of the trays is in the picture above and to the left. See if you can identify any of the artifacts. The students did exceptionally well on these tests, and by Friday we were ready to start the analysis of ceramics from the 86-36 collection. (The answers to the tray are: A)Porcelain, “double happiness” decoration; B) Stoneware, molded relief decoration; C) Earthenware, slipped and burnished; D) Ironstone, transfer print decoration; E) Pearlware, annular decoration; F) Whiteware, flow blue transfer print; G) Porcelain, celadon decoration; H) Porcelain, “4 seasons” decoration; I) Tin-Glazed earthenware; hand painted.)

Featured Artifact

The artifacts of the week are three artifacts that were cataloged by the students in CASA 103/203. They illustrate the diversity of the collections that we will be analyzing. Despite this diversity in form, decoration, and function; the students in the course were able to successfully identify these artifacts, fill out their catalog forms, and enter the data into the computerized database.