Now for Something Completely Different

The DeKalb Daily Chronicle released a follow-up article on the Shabbona Grove Archaeological Project! Of course, the article has been archived from the newspaper's website, so if anyone has an electronic copy (or a nice digital photograph!) I'd greatly appreciate if you'd share it with us!

Here's the preview until I get a full copy.

Archaeological Methods: Flotation

Archaeology is a meticulous science. We try to collect the most information possible at a site, especially during excavation where we destroy some evidence as we collect others. One of the techniques that archaeologists use to collect some of the smallest samples is called flotation. There are many reasons to take samples and many strategies on how one samples, but the primary reason that archaeologists employ flotation is that it allows for the collection of the most miniscule datasets that could not be recovered in any other way. Most commonly, this is the best way to collect any remains of food production through seeds, small bones, and charcoal. This method can also recover micro-flakes from stool tool making, beads, miniscule charcoal bits that can help in dating or establishing a fire history for the area, and all the other tiny artifacts that would otherwise be lost in traditional excavation methods.

In this methodology, a sample of soil of consistent volume is taken from the excavation. This sample is then placed in a container of clean water. In some places, archaeologists have constructed specialty tubs to speed up this next step of removing the dirt from the micro-samples. In these wonderful machines, the sample is put in a mesh container that fits into a large tub of clean water. Agitators (tubes with holes along the length that shoot water upwards like a dishwasher) on the bottom of the tub spin and gently clean the artifacts. The heavy artifacts, intrinsically called the "heavy fraction", sink to the bottom of the interior basket while the lightest materials, called the "light fraction", float to the top. The light fraction is skimmed off the top of the water and caught in a light fabric square to dry. The heavy fraction is taken from the water in the interior mesh basket and the micro-artifacts let out to dry. Although having an agitator helps speed up the flotation process, sometimes the dirt can still be hard to break up, especially in soils heavy in clay. Depending on the size of the tub, large sample sizes can be processed at once. This is convenient for large, ongoing projects that may need to process many samples of large volume. However, the tubs do cost a fair amount of money to construct, and a good supply of water in order to run (which also costs money).

After the samples have dried, the micro-artifacts are often sent to specialists for analysis and further processing. A lithics (stone tools) expert may look at the micro-debitage; a paleo-botanist (floral analyst) may look at the seeds and plant remains; a faunal expert may look at any tiny bones or scales recovered. These experts may be able to look at seasonality, food consumption, tool production, and where different materials that peoples in the past were using. In the next post, I'll tell you how we used flotation techniques at Shabbona Grove and what it tells us about the past!

Story of an Artifact: "Truman" Whiskey Bottle

President Harry S. Truman. Source.

I hope this to be the first in a sequence of posts concerning the lives of the artifacts found during the excavation at Shabbona Grove. This gorgeous bottle is one of the most enigmatic pieces found during the surface collection, with the face of a spectacled man on the front who the crew originally thought looked like President Harry S. Truman. Above the portrait is a line that states "Federal Law Forbids Sale or Re-Use of this Bottle". This inscription was required by law to be applied to all alcohol bottles following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 and was used until the mid-1960s. To the left is an industrial scene on water and to the right is a single colonial-style house. I apologize for the poor lighting in the photographs; clear glass is difficult to work with and I've had no formal instruction in artifact photography.

Left side. Beneath the wheat reads "Harry E." The other side

 has another name, William Wilken.

The bases of bottles often contain vital information about the manufacturer. The maker's mark on this bottle is a W above a T in an inverted triangle.

The aluminum cap, machine-made bottle, and inscription clearly marked the bottle after World War I. But did did the picture really depict President Truman? What did the bottle contain and when was it made? Do we know how it could've gotten into Shabbona Grove? Because the bottle was found on the surface, little can be gained from its provenience and it's relationship to the other artifacts. We would have to rely on the information carried on the artifact itself to figure out its story. 

The first line of evidence to explore was the manufacturer's mark on the bottom of the bottle. As shown above, the manufacturer's mark is a W above a T in an inverted triangle. Historic glass enthusiast David Whitten has published an impressive directory of marks on his webpage (here) that contained this mark! He attributed the mark to the Whitall Tatum Company from New Jersey in the years 1922-1938. Whitten emphasizes the pharmaceutical bottles produced by the company, but this bottle does not share the trademark rectangular shape with front and side panels to display the pharmacy name on (as shown in the examples on Whitten's website here). This information immediately tells us that the man on the front of the bottle is unlikely to be Truman, as he did not gain presidency until 1945. The other numbers on the bottom of the bottle are coded to indicate the form and date that the glass was made, but I couldn't find the manufacturer's information to discover anything more from the mark.

The names on the side of the bottle gave another line of evidence to try and discover what its original contents may be. After googling around the internet, it came to light that many other people had found similar bottles from the Wilken Family Blended Whiskey Company. There were many permutations of the description on the bottle, from an exact copy of what the Shabbona Grove Archaeological Project had uncovered to pictures of three of the family distillers such as you can see on a forum at antique-bottles.net here. An advertisement in the New York Evening Post from January 1939, shares part of the story of the family. (Blogger doesn't want to upload the picture here, so I'll put it in another post below.) Important to the dating of the bottle, however, is the fact that Harry Wilken did not join the family business until 1934. That gives our bottle a neat 4-year range of likely production, 1934-1938. 1938 coincides with both the date that the Whitall Tatum company was bought out and that the Wilken Family registered with a trademark not seen on this bottle (the trademark can be seen here).

Shabbona Grove in 1934-1938 would have had access to all sorts of remote goods via its connection on the Northern Illinois Railroad and Shabbona (proper)'s railway connection to Chicago. In this period following the economic crash of 1929, Shabbona was feeling the economic depression felt in rural places all around the nation. From 1903-1943, the Creamery, recreation hall, hotel, tin shop, and Methodist Church were all dismantled or torn down. Agriculture remained the main employer in the area, but such work was extremely exhausting and times were tough. Alcohol would've been an agreeable escape for many of the hardships known by the residents of Shabbona Grove, but the archaeology does not definitively suggest that consumption of the alcohol happened on the site or even in Shabbona Grove. The location of the bottle simply indicates its final deposition but does not leave many clues as to its compete journey.

January 18, 1929 New York Post: Wilken Family Blended Whiskey Ad

A Return

Hello Friends of Shabbona Grove!

After a long winter of washing artifacts in a basement, I've gotten a good kick of accountability back in me to wrap up the archaeology of Shabbona Grove. In the next two weeks I'll account what we found, how we processed it, how the archaeological process works at this site, interesting and mystery artifacts, our conclusions, and various other fun tidbits related to the site.

If you have any questions or suggestions about what you'd like to know about archaeology in general or at Shabbona Grove, don't hesitate to comment on this page.

All the best.

Apology

As some of you may know, after the last post was written exciting things started to happen. We opened two units in the southwest area of the property, finding what seems to be refuse from the destruction of the last house on the property. Excavation has stopped for this year as it gets colder, darker, and the obligations of school hold us captive. I'll slowly tell various aspects of what we found, how we did it, and what it means. Most of the analysis lies ahead and interpretation will be slowly coming together as we piece together all of the various lines of evidence.

Who Lived Here?

One of the most common questions I get about the site is: Who lived here? And, honestly, I have to answer that I don't know. We have some historical documents and oral stories that give us hints, though...

Above is a picture of the hand-written records of the transfer of property from the County Clerk's Office of DeKalb, back to the early twentieth century! The first record we have is a Mr. MS Overton selling to Annie Bates on October 8th, 1910. It takes some patience to go through all of the records and try reading the cursive writing. Earlier than 1910, DeKalb Countyrecords are by the grantor/grantee (seller/buyer)'s names rather than by the property. This creates a much more laborious process, especially if the property goes through the family or if there are people with similar names.

Even if we are able to track the transfer of property, however, that does not tell us who was actually living on the land, if they built on it, or what they did with it at all. It does give us hints, however, of the social structure throughout time, so when we have more information we can try to understand more about the situation in which the people at West and Short lived.

The above is a picture of a hand-drawn map that was made by a former resident of Shabbona Grove. Although it isn't as formal of a document as historians are used to, it provides much more detail about what we're interested in: the people who lived here. This document represents a memory of a childhood long past; we must give allowance to accidents and inaccuracies. Many historical archaeologists rely on fire insurance maps to accurately show where buildings were in the early part of the 20th century. Shabbona Grove was in decline by the begging of the 20th century, however, so only the part of town closest to the railway was recorded. We have no formal documents that record the building, distruction, or inhabitation of the properties between West and Short that I know of. (But if you think differently, I'd love to be proved wrong!!)



We still don't know who lived on these properties. But hopefully our investigations can shed a little bit of light on this murky situation.