The class for which this website was designed has come to a successful close! Following the link in the right hand column of this page, you can access the student papers written in this class. Two of these papers were read at the annual meeting of the Society for California Archaeology in Sacramento, as part of a panel presentation about this project. Members of the Chinese Historical and Cultural Project, Stanford University, and Past Forward, Inc. took part, and the panel was very well attended and stimulated considerable discussion afterward. It was great to see how much interest there is in the archaeological community concerning this collection! Now that the class has come to a close, this website will have new postings about once a month, although there may be more frequent postings if necessary. Please take advantage of the discussion tool located at the bottom of this page in order to be able to submit your own thoughts about this project or any of the content of this website! Because we are beginning a new phase of cataloging, this month’s posting is intended to provide some basic information about the work we are doing.

Several of the former students from the class will be cataloging this quarter. This is possible due to the financial support of the San Jose Redevelopment Agency – thank you! The cataloging phase of this project begins with the boxes pictured above right. These boxes contain artifacts sorted for the most part by material type. For now, we are concentrating on finishing the cataloging of all ceramics from this collection. As we identify and catalog the artifacts, they are then checked and entered into the database (see earlier postings for more detailed descriptions of these steps – they are available, organized by week, at the top of the right-hand column). After this, artifacts are individually repackaged and grouped according to the feature they were recovered from. The picture to the left shows the drawers in which these artifacts are stored. This allows us to have an overview of artifacts from the same feature, and the eventual repackaging and long-term curation of these artifacts according to feature will help facilitate interpretive research with this collection. We are looking forward to cataloging as much of this collection as possible, concentrating first upon completing the ceramics, and then moving on to glass artifacts.

Featured Artifact

One of the ceramic artifacts unpacked from the artifact boxes this past week was this teapot, artifact 85-31/18-1. This numbering system indicates that it is from the Market Street Chinatown, Lot 85-31. Specifically, it is from feature 18. The last number is a control number that assists in the inventory of artifacts from the same feature. This teapot is in remarkably good condition, although its spout has been broken off. Inside the teapot is the wire handle by which it would have been picked up. Although teapots such as these are characteristic for overseas Chinese sites, we have not been able to find out whether there is a name for the pattern of its decoration. Decorative patterns are often useful for determining the rough date of manufacture, place of origin, or relative economic value of an artifact. Do you know more about the decorative pattern of this teapot? If so, please let us know in the discussion comments! Please check back at this website. Even though we will be updating monthly, the discussion forum can be used to provide a place for discussion of this collection, project, and overseas Chinese archaeology. The discussion part of this website is yours!

It’s hard to believe, but we are already approaching the end of the Winter Quarter, and the completion of this course! The students are busy putting the finishing touches on their projects, and gave preliminary research presentations on Thursday in class. Soon these projects will be posted on this website, so please check back next week to read them! In our final week, students are continuing to catalog artifacts, as Lynsie is doing in this picture. The students in this class have really made a great amount of progress in cataloging the Market Street Chinatown collection. This was very clear as we reviewed the database entries to double check the consistency and completeness of the entries students made in the database – there were a lot to go through!

Pictured here is a single form from the database. It cannot be read because the image is so small here, but this form records pertinent information about artifact 85-31/33-108, a small ceramic fragment. The database can be viewed either as a form, showing information about one artifact at a time, or as a spreadsheet summarizing information about all artifacts on a single page. The production of this database is oriented to achieving two goals. The first is a detailed, easily usable catalog of the artifacts, useful for inventory control and for gaining an overall picture of what the collection contains. The second is research-oriented: this database is searchable, and the searches that can be made are very flexible in nature. After students finished recording information about artifacts, they entered this information directly into the database. This information will allow this collection to be used as a resource for study and research, and will allow quite focused questions to be asked about the collection. We hope that this database will make data about this collection more widely available and also more easily used. Additionally, we hope that the data from this collection can be used not simply to count the number of plates in the collection, but to build a better understanding of the lives that were lived at the Market Street Chinatown.

Artifact of the Week

Many of the artifacts in the Market Street Chinatown collection evoke a feeling of connection with the individuals who lived there. This is particularly true of some of the “small finds” that were recovered from the site. The artifact on the left is a wooden game tile that was probably used to play mahjong. It’s surprisingly well preserved after being buried for nearly one hundred years! The middle artifact is a decorative hair comb. On the right are two eyeglass frame fragments with the lenses still intact. The white clouding in the otherwise clear lenses is a patina, the result of chemical changes in the glass lenses that occurred while they were buried. When I handle these artifacts, I find myself thinking about the people who used and wore them – and I wonder what they would have thought if they could have known that we would be so closely studying the broken bits of things they threw away.

Sarah Puckitt of History San Jose visited our class this week, and talked about photo documentation of artifacts. Her talk included information about photographing single artifacts and also the place of photo documentation in collections management as a whole. Sarah is the Visual Resources Manager at History San Jose, and brought several examples of photo documentation work she has undertaken there. After this talk, we set up our photo documentation equipment in the lab. Students are beginning to photograph artifacts as part of the work associated with their project research and presentation. Already many of the lighting and framing tips given by Sarah are proving to be useful! Light can be used to highlight details that are difficult to see on the artifact, such as faint decoration or low relief. Photo documentation is important in archaeological work, in providing a visual record that can be consulted by others interested in the collection, when physical access to artifacts is difficult or impossible. Good photo documentation is also an integral part of the long-term conservation and preservation of artifact collections, because a good visual record minimizes the need to handle artifacts, and therefore decreases risks of loss or breakage.

Dr. Rebecca Allen took some time out of her busy schedule to visit our class during this Friday’s lab session. She was one of the archaeologists responsible for the excavation of the Woolen Mills Chinatown in San Jose. Several of the students in this class are pursuing research projects that involve comparisons between the artifacts recovered from the Market Street and Woolen Mills sites, in order to address comparative questions about life in these two settlements. These students are cataloging and analyzing artifacts from the Market Street Chinatown collection, and comparing their results with data presented in the Woolen Mills report, Volume 1 of which is pictured to the left. Dr. Allen was very helpful in suggesting further readings and resources for students to use, as well as helping to answer some challenging questions about artifact identification and interpretation.

 

 

Artifact of the Week

And speaking of artifact identification and interpretation… One of the students in the class is examining medicinal bottles and medicinal practices as represented in artifacts from the Market Street Chinatown. This is not quite as straightforward as it may sound, as the definition of medicinal practices is not a simple one. Pictured here are fragments or examples of bottles that provoked a lot of questions. From left to right, these are a soda water bottle, a bottle that contained a compound “For the Hair”, and a bottle labeled “Aromatic Schnapps.” None of these artifacts are clearly medicinal in nature, but Schnapps was and is considered a health-fortifying drink by some people, hair tonics contribute to “healthy” hair, and soda water was and is often consumed to quell stomach upset. Questions about these artifacts demonstrate a real challenge of archaeological description. Decisions about how to catalog them involve substantial interpretive decisions. How would you classify these artifacts?