Cataloging Booze

I am reviewing a report that describes the excavation of a historic-era site in Los Angeles County.  The reports authors have divided the description of the artifacts found into several categories based on the cataloging typology used by the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA.  These categories include Structural Artifacts (items such as nails, parts of beams, electrical bits and bobs that are part of the structure of a building), Domestic Artifacts (objects that are not part of a house's structure, but belong to a household - utensils, furniture parts, medicine bottles, etc.), Activity-Related Artifacts (items from activities not related to structures or the day-to-day functioning of a household, including work tasks as well as entertainment),and Personal Artifacts (including articles of clothing, children's toys, and other items likely to belong to an individual rather than a household).

A sub-category of Personal Artifacts is Personal Indulgences, and a sub category of Personal Indulgences is Alcohol-Related Artifacts.

This seems very, very odd to me.

While the solitary consumption of alcohol is, of course, nothing new, the assumption that artifacts related to alcohol consumption belong in the sub-category of Personal Indulgences and not the category of Domestic Artifacts or Activity-Related Artifacts is rather odd.  Certainly, alcohol has long been a contentious substance, and demonization of it is no more new than solitary consumption of it, but while ambivalence towards alcohol may be an old phenomenon, the particular notion that it is specifically a personal indulgence more than something for household or entertainment use seems to smack somewhat of us projecting our particular flavor of ambivalence onto the people of the past.

Use of alcohol at family meals is not uncommon across the world.  While alcohol consumption by children is often (though not always) limited by social practices, it has historically been quite common in many cultures (including many that have occupied the United States) for wine, beer, or other alcoholic beverages to form an important part of daily meals.  Far from being the "demon liquor" of personal vice, this was simply a standard part of household provisions.  And many of these drinking customs continued even well after their practical causes (in those cases where practical causes existed) became irrelevant. 

What's more, anthropologists have long acknowledged the role of alcohol in social gatherings.  Alcohol has long been, and of course continues to be, a significant component of social gatherings and entertaining.  So, it's odd that alcohol paraphernalia, is not included amongst the domestic debris, would not be placed in the same category as entertainment-related artifacts.

And, of course, there's the fact that throughout the 19th and early 20th century, consumable alcohol was often kept as a medical supply (it still is for some purposes, though not as frequently as in the past).  Meaning, once again, that there is a potential domestic use of alcohol in addition to meals and entertaining.

It's worth noting that much of the anti-alcohol propaganda of the late 19th and early 20th century focused on beer halls, saloons, and taverns as places of evil (hence prohibition, which was far more strict regarding drinking establishments than personal ownership and consumption), while much of our current worries about alcohol focus on the solitary alcoholic, the person who drinks alone and can't get through the day without his flask.  I suspect that the placement of alcohol-related artifacts in this catalog system is indicative of our current attitudes.

On Buying a Digital Scale

I volunteered to do the faunal analysis for a research project in the southern San Joaquin Valley.  The principle investigator* is a friend of mine who teaches at a university in England**, and while he has grant money for many things, he doesn't have enough to cover all tasks necessary to complete the project.  As such, he relies in part on the work of fools...err, I mean volunteers such as myself who are willing to use our skills to assist his project without charging him anything.

Now, the faunal analysis is pretty much what it sounds like: I get the bone and shell that has come out of the site, and try to figure out what animals it came from, whether or not there are signs of it having been modified (whether by people cutting meat off of the bones, burning it during cooking, or trying to make tools out of it).  It essentially consists of slowly sorting through all of the fragments of bone, assigning everything to as specific a category as you can (often just placing it in broad "large, animal, medium animal" categories, but occasionally being able to figure out the genus or even species), and noting relevant features (cut marks on the bone, burning, etc.). 

The bone that I am looking at is badly fragmented, which means that, often, a simple count of bone fragments will tell you more about the factors damaging the bone than about the animals - interesting in its own right and valuable, but I still have to make sense of the faunal remains.  So, in addition to counting up the bone fragments, we also weigh them, which in circumstances such as this can often tell you more about what the site residents were prioritizing in their hunting and eating habits. 

So, with that in mind, I set out to buy a digital scale that could measure with 0.01 gram precision.

Now, in every city in which I have lived, this would have been an easy task.  I know of places in Modesto, Santa Cruz, and Santa Barbara in which I could find such things.  So, Fresno being the largest city in which I have lived, I figured that finding an appropriate scale here would be a piece of cake.  I was very wrong.

The first problem I ran into is that, despite it's size, Fresno has a relative dearth of stores catering to scientific labs.  That's not to say that they aren't here, but there are fewer than one would think.  The second problem is that, rather contrary to what one might expect, these places do not sell scales with the level of precision that I required.  In fact, there was a surprising number of scales that measured in pounds and ounces and not in the metric scale, as one would expect for lab equipment. 

So, on the advice of the the folks at one such store, I went to several office supply stores, which I was told would have digital metric scales.  They did, but their level of precision was 0.1 grams, and not the required 0.01 grams.  Moreover, most of them were in the $100 range - which, considering that I am doing this work as a volunteer and that for most of the last year I have been the only income in my household (making money tight) I wasn't really willing to pay.

It dawned on me that I should try a hardware store - certainly a place that sells every form of tool you could want would also sell a scale.  I mean, I might not find a metric one, but it was worth a try, right?  Well, wrong.  I discovered that the hardware stores in Fresno (including the national chains) do not, in fact, carry scales of any kind (aside from the odd bathroom scale, not the precision or accuracy that I need).  What's more, asking for help led to the sales staff eyeing me, assuming that I am a drug manufacturer and/or dealer - one salesman even went so far as to inform me that that's what he figured I or anyone would be buying the scale for.  Trying to explain that I am a scientist looking for a piece of lab equipment didn't seem to assuage his worries, as he seemed to think that this was a cover story.

I wonder what kind of watch list Home Depot has had me placed on.

Well, the hardware stores were a bust.  So, I decided to head out to the local cooking supplies store - it was a longshot, but they would have scales and they might have them in the units and level of precision that I needed.  Again, I found scales, but they would do, at best, 0.1 grams, and most didn't deal in metric at all***.  And, again, it was made clear that, despite my protestations about scientific work, it was suspected that I was a drug manufacturer/dealer. 

I wonder what kind of watch list Williams Sonoma has had me placed on.

Finally, one of the cooking store salesmen decided that he wasn't part of the war on drugs, and told me that I could find a high-precision scale at one of the local sporting good stores.  It would measure amounts in the range that I needed, and apparently is used by hunters who pack their own shotgun shells.  The problem, however, is that it doesn't measure in metric, or even pounds and ounces, but instead in the far more esoteric measurement unit known as grains.  A grain correlates to approximately 64.8 milligrams (or 0.648 grams) making the conversion problem even more obnoxious than simply measuring in ounces.

In the end, I bought one on line.  I found a jeweler's scale that measures to 0.01 grams, comes with a calibrating weight, and is in my price range.  It's unlikely to be a great scale, but it will have to do. 

Really, though, who would have thought that finding a scale in a city of half a million people would be such a pain in the ass?





*Translates to English as "Head Honcho" or "Big Cheese."  The archaeologist who is ultimately responsible for all work performed.

**The irony of him leaving for England to perform excavation near Bakersfield is not lost on me

***If at this point you wonder why I didn't buy one that measures in ounces and just convert the sum, the reasons are twofold: 1) they still wouldn't measure at the level of precision that I needed, and 2) I have something in the neighborhood of 2,000 bags of bone to weigh and process by January.  The slow-down required to convert all of them would simply not be worth it.

Workin' the Bone

I have been spending my free time working with bone.

I volunteered to help out a friend of mine with a research project. My friend is a professor at a university in England, and has, over the last several years, put together a team of other archaeologists who spend time working on aspects of his principle research project - the excavation and analysis of a series of sites in the south of California's San Joaquin Valley* - and I am his faunal guy. The upshot of which is that I have a box filled with bone, most of it in small slivers due to taphonomic** processes, and I am sorting and doing a basic analysis of it.

It's an odd experience. On the one hand, it is tedious work, sorting through several pounds of bone slivers, most of them less than an inch long, and figuring out what category they belong in (large mammal, small mammal, medium-sized mammal, sea mammal, fish, reptile, etc.), and with large enough pieces, trying to figure out exactly which type of animal it belonged to (deer, skunk, coyotes, and so on). On the other hand, it's also a skill - being able to look at a sliver of bone and see the features that clearly identify it as being from one creature and not another, or knowing how thick a large mammal's cortical bone is vs. a small mammal's, etc., and I have amazingly not lost my skill over the years in which I have primarily written reports and done surveys - in fact, I seem to be getting sharper.

It's also a bit odd for me because this is pure research - there's no resource management angle and no regulatory reason for the work. My friend is an academic, so all of this is done for the sake of generating data, hopefully learning a thing or two about Californian archaeology, and publishing it. So, on the one hand, this means that I do the work on my own time without being able to use company time or resources on it. On the other hand, this means that I am largely free to do what I think is appropriate with the materials, provided that my work meets the needs of the rest of the team working on the research project.

One of the things that this is reminding me of, though, is just how much pains-taking, often monotonous work one must engage in when doing research. It is possible that the analysis of the animal bone will reveal something important about the site...but it is equally possible, perhaps even more likely, that it won't. Still, we have to do it so that we can be certain that we haven't unnecessarily left an obvious route of investigation out***. One of the things that I often hear or read when I see pseudo-archaeologists respond to criticism that they haven't bothered to do basic due-diligence in working out their conclusions is something along the lines of "what, do you honestly expect us to sift through every rock, piece of bone, and scour each part of the ground?" To which I can only respond "why not, we have to."





*The irony of these people leaving a country where the normal summer temperatures are relatively conducive to fieldwork to travel to a hot, arid location where heat stroke is common does not escape me.

**Taphonomy is the study of post-depositional processes - that is, the study of what happens between the time that archaeological materials are discarded and the time that an archaeologist comes along and digs them up. Taphonomic processes include items being moved due to soil movement, broken due to animal and plant activity, eaten away due to soil acidity, etc.

***That being said, there will always be something that you couldn't research, look into, or evaluate, either because you didn't think of it, because doing so would have prevented you from investigating something that seemed more important, or because you simply didn't have the time and/or resources. It's unfortunate, but a fact of life.

In the Bone Room With Screaming Eddie

I am involved in a project that is intended to analyze the archaeological remains of a shaman’s cave in Kern County. My part of the project is the faunal remains – the bone, shell, and other animal parts that provide evidence of ancient people’s somewhat-less-than-vegan activities.

Bone in archaeological sites tends to come from a lot of different animals, and tends to be fragmented. For these two reasons, identifying the source of the bone is rarely a straightforward process, and none but the most experienced faunal analysts can pick up a bone and announce what it is, where it came from, and how old the animal was – and even these most experienced analysts can be stumped from time to time.

Enter the comparative collection.

A comparative collection can best be thought of as a road kill library. It’s a collection of bones, teeth, hooves, shell, and sometimes hair and scales, from whatever animal was unfortunate enough to buy the farm in the general vicinity of an archaeologist. Often the collection also contains human bones – increasingly from willing donors, but many collections contain the now decades-old remains of unfortunates who died in third-world countries and were sold to medical schools and science labs in the U.S. and Western Europe.

So, this morning I entered the faunal laboratory at UC Santa Cruz, and began trying to figure out where the bone in the collection I was examining came from. Entering the room, I was delighted to see that in addition to the bones in cabinets that I had come to make use of and the obligatory articulated skeletons on the walls, the lab also housed a desiccated monkey’s head and an articulated skeleton that had either had the soft tissue surrounding it plasticized, or else had very realistic soft-tissue attached to it. This skeleton was posed in a way intended to allow anatomy students to see how the muscle, nerve, and skeletal systems work together, but also made it look as if the poor fellow were still ambulatory AND had realized that some dick of a medical student had stolen his skin. I decided to nickname the guy “Screaming Eddie.”*

Having taken in the local color, I decided to get to work on my appointed task. I got off to a good start; I chose my first bone – the humerus of a large herbivore of some sort – and opened my first cabinet, thinking that I’d start by comparing it to a mule deer. Amazingly, I pulled the bone out of the collection drawer, and it matched the one from the archaeological site exactly. Nice.

So, feeling cocky, I pulled out my next bone – the articular end (part that connects to another bone) of a scapula (shoulder bone). I compared it to the mule deer’s. No dice. I then compared it to an elk, antelope, several sea mammals, and even a human. No match. I never did find out what animal it belonged to. It was the right size for a deer, but there was a small channel on the bone that is not found on deer Scapulae, so I was at a loss.

Well, sometimes you don’t get a match, so I decided to move on to the next bone. This was a tarsal – a bone from the back foot, again from a mule deer. Okay. Next bone, a radius, again from a mule deer. And so on.

In the end, I identified bones from rabbit, gopher, deer, and mice. I was left with a large number of bones that I could find no match for – unfortunately the UCSC collection is rather small, and so there are numerous animals for which a match is not possible. Still, I think I made a respectable showing.

So, there ya’ go, next time you go thinking that archaeology is all Indiana Jones adventure or amazing discoveries in tombs, think of me in the lab surrounding by road kill, mummified monkey heads, and Screaming Eddie.



*I wanted to get pictures of the mummified monkey (mumkey?) and Screaming Eddie, but it seemed likely that the grad student working in the room would probably find that disturbing and disrespectful. So it goes.