Thursday 31 May 2012

May 30th: Lab Lab and More Lab

The whole crew was in the lab for the first full day of work on campus. Bob had us divide up the tasks of sorting through artifacts from previous Field School years, along with continuing to clean and label the finds from this season. Jasmin and Willow went over reports from past years regarding information on gardens and horticultural practices. The rest of us unpacked several of the boxes containing cataloged artifacts (mostly bottles and tin cans) to organize them as you can see in the picture below:

Kitty was having a look through these items in search of any artifacts containing Japanese writing. Her project is to take a closer look at and document the finds that are personal Japanese pieces in hopes of creating a better understanding of what life was like for them during the early 1900's at these camps.

This is the main part of a leather boot that Evan recovered from the "industrial cabin" zone at the McKenzie Creek site earlier this week. It's in remarkably good condition and still has some of the spikes attached to the bottom. This was found in the same area as this wood planer:

The planer is also in great condition. This is one of a few tools that we have found in this area, leading us to think it was possibly an industrial zone rather than a cabin. 

This is a photo of a task that Mark took on today: piecing together a broken medicine bottle found in the "cabin" area of the site. We can see so far by the writing on it that it's from Toronto, Ontario.
Below is a video clip of Mark talking about this artifact:



This week we hope to find more clues as to what the "industrial cabin" area might have been used for. We had found a piece of butchered animal bone in the same spot where the boot and wood planer were buried which was interesting. Was that spot a garbage hole for broken and used items or just a matter of scattered refuse coincidentally clumped together before the structure was burned down? We hope to solve that mystery before the Field School is complete this season.

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