 So we have one of Anthropology's graduate students here speaking, a PhD candidate, Peter Hyde, and he's really engagementally involved in the middle of this project, his dissertation work, so we're going to get to an update on how he got there and where he's going with it with some information on the way. So we're going to be hearing about the industrial frontier. The industrial frontier is out here on the West Coast. Life and labor in the industrial frontier, the archaeology of the Samuel Adams Line Kills. Not here, I guess, but the Line Kills, which doesn't sound like much fun, but St. Cruz, California. So thank you, Peter. Thank you. Introduction, Christine, and thank you everybody for being here. It's been a little while since I participated in the Brown Bag, and this is the first time I'm actually presenting on my dissertation research. So I'm happy to be getting it out there, and I'm really excited to hear your thoughts and any feedback and concerns and issues you might have with it at this stage of the research process. So this is very much going to be what I did over the summer type Brown Bag. I'll talk about the work that we've been doing at the Samuel Adams Line Kills complex, and this is on Wilder Ranch State Park, if any of you are familiar with the Santa Cruz area, just off Highway 1 down there. I'm still in the process of working through a lot of the materials. We excavated this summer, so spoiler alert, I will not have nice clean conclusions and interpretations and things like that. I actually can't even guarantee I'll have that later on, but I know, right? That's the fun part. But I can promise you that I will talk about what we did there this summer, the field work, the kinds of questions and ideas that brought me to this site, our methods, and then, importantly, some of the interesting patterns and objects that we found that kind of have me thinking and where I kind of think we're going to be going forward with this project. So I came to this project really with an interest in a particular, well, an interest in the social and historical particularities of a time and place, and that's really the 19th century California, late 19th century of California. I'm interested in this period in particular because it's an extremely tumultuous and dynamic time period. Following the discovery of gold in 1848, you all know this story, multiple waves of massive immigration, or multiple massive waves of immigration, people coming from all over the world to this part. At the same time, however, there's rapid technological change happening, rampant industrialization and urbanization, plus the introduction of extensive railroad and road networks and shipping networks, so really people are getting linked, people, ideas, and things are getting linked in new ways. Permanent through all of this is the emergence of industrial capitalist modes of production, organization, and management. As the historian David Eigler notes, on a most basic level, industrial capitalism transformed the relationship between people, work, and their communities. Industrialization reshuffled the social bonds and tensions in 19th century America and profoundly affected the way people lived, worked, and made sense of the social world and their place within it. And yet I would argue that these structuring principles of industrial capitalism, if we can call them that, were not formed sort of separate from the laboring populace and imposed on them from the outside, which has often sort of been the conventional thought, or at least the way people have talked about this kind of stuff. These broader processes were themselves partly a product of the laborers' daily tactics and routine practices that were sort of continuously being negotiated and transformed as different groups of people came into contact and engaged in new relationships amidst the sort of emerging industrial California landscape. So really at the core my research interests are concerned with the relationship between these emerging industrial capitalists, between emerging industrial capitalism and labor. And by labor I mean the lives, the experiences, and the daily practices of these industrial workers, as well as the impacts this had on the broader social landscape of California and the implications that this has all the way up for today. And I just want to be clear, especially after, for those of you who were at Anna Singh's lecture, I would agree with her that studies of capitalism make for fascinating, interesting, if not sometimes horrifying topics for anthropological research. But I want to make clear that in my discussion I'm not viewing capitalism and industrialization as anything like progress or development. Sometimes it can be framed that way. So at the very heart of my interests and questions there's a very sort of different and unromantic, very unlike this photo understanding of the American far west, which has often been seen as an open space of kind of endless opportunity and freedom. And that's a very sort of white upper middle class idea that reflected and was designed to reproduce certain democratic and nationalistic ideals of America. And it's still kind of the way a lot of us are taught to think about this, this geopolitical space even today. So newer conceptions of the American west try to situate it within a larger context of global capitalism. And the west is now being seen, among many other things, as an arena of struggle to borrow an idea from McGuire and Reckner. And it's the idea that this is a place where constructions of gender, race and ethnicity in class were being constantly confronted, contested and transformed with lasting implications for the area and for the nation as a whole. Excuse me, within this social context and broader interests, that's quite fuzzy, I apologize. My research is really focused on labor and labor relations because I think they lie really at the nexus of these sort of various intersecting relations and tensions that surround things like ethnicity, gender and class that characterize this period. Labor serves as my thread, if you will, to sort of trace the interweaving or maybe intermeshing I feel Engel's idea is a better word to talk about it, of these intermeshing and emerging and shifting industrial, social relations, positions, identities, materials, landscapes. And it's really this view of labor and labor relations that frame my questions and interests. So before I get too far into it, I want to be clear about how kind of I'm thinking about labor. I work with a broad definition, this comes from Steve Silamon's work, where he defines labor as the social and material relations, he defines it very broadly, as the social and material relations involved in the production, distribution or manipulation of items for personal use or use by others. But importantly, Silamon goes on to recognize that labor is also colonized, it's enforced, it's controlled, it's exploited, indebted, hierarchical, unequally distributed, often rigidly structured and simultaneously global and local. And those are his words, but I think they're good ones. Thinking of labor in this way allows us to conceptualize laborers as social workers, which is an idea brought forward by Casella in 2005. And if we think of it this way, we can explore questions related to the complex and diverse ways in which labor was structured, accommodated, made use of and lived through. So investigations of labor from this perspective don't stop at the factory floor, if you will, or maybe I should say the kiln door in this context. But labor and the sort of web of social relations in which it's enmeshed extends to places like the households, the streets, and places like saloons even. So when we consider industrial laborers as social workers, they can be examined not only as victims of global structures and historical processes, which is the more sort of traditional approach, but also as active agents in the construction of these emerging industrial modes of work and life. All right, so before I get to the specific research questions and that kind of stuff with our site in particular, I kind of want to talk about the same Latin site in the broader lime industry, which is really at the focus of this work. So starting with the lime industry more generally, the principle used for processed lime, which is often called quick lime, in both the past and the present is primarily in sort of masonry construction type work. It's the main ingredient in things like mortar and plaster and whitewash. Although today and in the past it was used in a huge range of things. Everything from processing sugar and paper to tanning hides, flux and steel making, pharmaceuticals, it's, I could go on, it's almost everywhere. The important part is that lime is a critical material in many of the objects and processes associated with the modern world, I would argue anyways. But there are not actually that many naturally occurring and accessible limestone outcrops in California or on the west coast. So this caused a bit of a problem for early colonists and settlers in this area. At some point around the 1850s, however, it was discovered that there was a high quality lime rock in the western foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. And then sometime between 1851 and 1853, spurred by this rapid increase in population and demand for local and affordable building materials, a lime industry took root in Santa Cruz County where it could take advantage of this high quality raw material, but also the sufficient timber stands that were necessary to process it, and then the maritime transportation networks necessary to get it to market. So, and then before this local industry took place, lime was actually having to be shipped all the way from the east coast, in some cases even Europe. So it was very expensive. And that's one of the reasons much of their early construction following the gold rush in California was all built with timber architecture, but those communities were, as we know, routinely devastated by fire. So there was a growing demand for masonry construction and a lot of entrepreneurial minded people came to Santa Cruz to take advantage of that demand. And 27 year old Samuel Adams, I can't find a picture of him, I don't know if one exists, but you'll have to imagine him. 27 year old Samuel Adams was one of these sort of entrepreneurial individuals, and in 1858 he came from the east coast and he purchased 200 acres that included a large natural lime rock outcrop located roughly two miles from the coast, two miles north from the coast in Santa Cruz, and then just west of the city of Santa Cruz itself. His operation was a fairly quick success at peak production. He was producing roughly 30,000 barrels of lime per year and it seemed to be fairly lucrative for that time period. But by 1868 regional competition had increased and five major Santa Cruz companies were providing the majority of lime to the California markets and they were actually selling, they produced about 75% of all the lime that was being sold at San Francisco, which was the main market. In October of 1968, however, there was the massive Hayward earthquake, which led to a depression in the California lime industry. People realized masonry is better, a little bit better against fire, but it's not so great where there's also earthquakes. So people went back to using timber and we kind of see this back and forth every time there's a fire or an earthquake. But this depression in the local market spurred Samuel Adams to sell his operation to the larger Davis and Cowell company who was buying up a bunch of land and resources at this time period. And the kilns actually fell into disuse until about 1879, when Davis and Cowell reopened the Samuel Adams kilns and they served as an important feature of their now expanding kind of lime producing conglomerate in that area. And historic sources really paint Henry Cowell, who was the owner and operator of Davis and Cowell as a strategic and kind of ruthless industrial capitalist. And his operations really dominated the industry by the late 19th century. That's why his name is kind of everywhere if you're ever down there. He didn't quite have a monopoly, but it was pretty darn close. But even Cowell's success was short-lived because all of this production, this boom in the industry quickly depleted the timber stands in the area, which led to increased fuel costs, new technological introductions like Portland cement made lime-based plaster less desirable. So all of these things led to a general decline in the industry in the early part of the 20th century. By the 1920s, essentially, the industry is just barely hanging on. And in 1946, the last operation, the Henry Cowell Lime and Cement Company, completely closes production. And that's the end of lime production in Santa Cruz. So if we look a little bit more closely, I didn't turn up great. I apologize. When we look a little closer at the Samuel Adams kilns between 1858 and 1906, which was when they were in operation, there's two distinct phases of operation that differ pretty widely in ownership and labor organization and in regional competition. During the first phase, when Samuel Adams was the owner, the lime kilns were independent. There was sort of an independent entrepreneurial operation. There was a lot of small-scale competition in the area. As you can sort of see, this is a chart of the different companies and how long they existed through time. So early in the industry, there's a lot of competition, although they peter out fairly quickly. During the second phase, from about 1868 to 1906, which is the time period we're concerned with, the Samuel Adams operation, as I mentioned, was just one part of a larger sort of conglomerate. And the industry as a whole kind of becomes dominated by one or a couple of these major companies. So we see a overall consolidation of resources and power and control in this industry. I think that's kind of interesting because the Samuel Adams site becomes kind of uniquely situated for an investigation of the ways in which or the social effects or impacts of resources and power consolidation on workers. We can see the way in which these bigger-scale processes impact the daily lives of these workers. Because we can look at how that happened at the same site in the same industry, but in two very different social, historic and economic contexts. And what's useful for us as archaeologists trying to explore this, it seems that the site was fairly rigidly, and spatially separated with what I'm calling domestic, manual, specialized and managerial laborers occupying different areas during work in the home life, as you can sort of see outlined on this map here with the kilns in the center up there, managerial labor, specialized labor, manual laborers, and then domestic labor out here. Importantly, there are also demographic shifts both at Samuel Adams and in the industry as a whole where we have census data from the site that suggests that during the first phase the workers were primarily native-born Americans, immigrants from the East Coast, not immigrants, immigrants from the East Coast, and Irish immigrants. So historical sources suggest that ethnic divisions at this time had the American-born workers in sort of managerial positions and Irish immigrants in the manual positions. During the second phase we have a more ethnically diverse workforce, and we have Portuguese and Italian immigrants coming in and serving as the manual labor base, and Irish immigrants seem to, in some cases, move up to the managerial and supervisory positions. During both periods, census documents and other documents suggest that Chinese immigrant men worked at the kilns as cooks and domestic laborers. Excuse me. So what were these guys actually doing? I'll walk you through the process of converting lime rock to limestone. So first, and I apologize for this photo, it's not super clear. I haven't had a chance to redraw it, and I owe Lori a thanks. This is actually from a sign in front of a kiln in Portugal, and it's the best schematic of processing lime that I've seen yet, so it's the one I'm using. But what's not shown here is the actual quarrying of the lime rock, the main objectives, after they've broken the rock down into roughly sort of six by six cubes. A laborer who was designated as the archer would come in, we have the kilns here, the kiln walls here, and this is an open space called the pot. So the archer would actually build an arch out of the raw material, and that had to be fairly well constructed because then the other raw limestone was piled up on top of that, the raw limestone arch. It was then capped and then it was fired, so this open space under the arch is the fire chamber, so that's where the fuel was added to burn this lime. After that process had taken place, they would actually break the arch with a hook and then give the material time to rest and cool, shovel the material out, put it into barrels, and send it to market. There are 40 cords of wood to process one full burn, which is about a thousand barrels of lime, and one cord is 128 cubic feet, so 17,920 cubic feet of wood, which if you're like me, you have no idea how much wood that actually is. It's probably like the size of this room, basically, it's a lot of wood. So it's a lot of this sort of fuel going into burning each load of lime. So the chemical process behind this is that when you heat lime rock, it basically drives out carbon dioxide from the raw material, carbon dioxide gas, from the calcium carbonate rock, and this converts it to calcium oxide, which is law, which is lime, and this process is called calcining, I have such a hard time saying that word, calcining, and to do this, you actually have to reach temperatures of at least 1,648 degrees Fahrenheit, and most kilns operated closer to 2,000 to 2,500 degrees, and this ideal temp, they didn't have thermometers, so it was achieved by using all sorts of different senses, that's for Annie back there, not only the sounds and sort of the feeling of the heat, but also the color of the limestone, it said that it had to reach sort of this golden yellow color, and if it wasn't heated enough, the core of the lime rock wouldn't break down, or mortar and plaster, but if it was overcooked, it wouldn't react well with water, also making it worthless. So I want to stress that this process of activities, this sort of Shane Apatoir, highlights that this immigrant manual labor is highly skilled labor, it appears at least some of these immigrant workers came to California with desirable skills, there's long histories of lime processing in England, in Portugal and Spain, other parts of Europe, or they may have developed their skills here in California, and there's skill at all levels of this process, from quarrying to firing to barrel making, and so we can't assume that therefore that the workforce of immigrant laborers in the lime industry was seen as easily replaceable, that the only value they added was sort of raw human power, as is often sort of depicted in discussions of power and control and industrial settings, wage labor settings. The laborers work and their individual skill proficiency in it made them and their work more valuable when compared to somebody else. So in a competitive local environment this could have given the manual laborers a degree of power in their relationship with the company that employed them. As companies would want the most skilled laborers producing the highest quality lime that would get them the highest price at the market, and I'll come back to this in a little bit with these ideas. So it's kind of evidence of the skill that it took to do this, here's a photo of the second pot at the Samuel Adams this is a loaded pot of lime and it was never fired for whatever reason, so they never finished the process. It's the only one that we know that exists like this in California, but it didn't collapse. So this kiln worker who built this arch built it well enough to last for 110 years. As an interesting, not total side note, but interesting note we put a unit next to the kiln to try to explore work space if we want to call it that, and some might call it luck. I like to call it skill. We came down right on a kiln door. This is a one by one, so we couldn't have planned it any better. We didn't even have to extend the wall or anything. It was pretty great. And this is solid cast iron. It weighs about 150 pounds. It's intense. It was not the most fun thing to get out of the unit and back to the site. But this is actually before we discovered this, there's only one other known example of this still existing. We were happy to be able to find that. The park is very excited that we found something like that. It doesn't really tell us a whole lot about the workers and things like that, but it's interesting nonetheless. I had to throw it in there. Okay, so let's get to some archaeology. How am I doing? Oh, that doesn't work. That's great. I was like, dear God, I'm not making it through this. So when we moved to some archaeological investigations at the site, there has been a fair amount of work done there. There were some surveys conducted in the 90s when state parks acquired this land and they really helped to identify some of the main features of the site and they produced some basic maps and things like that. But it was in between 2007 and 2009 that another team came in and did a fair amount of work. They excavated 26 units and three transects of shovel test pits, which aren't shown here, but were done around this area. And they recovered a tremendous amount of material that's been useful along with documentary records to help us figure out the difference between these spaces, who might have occupied those spaces and things like that. Unfortunately, as is all too often the case, there are virtually no documents associated with this collection. They've all been misplaced. There's no field forms. There are no maps. There's no journals. So we are limited with our ability to work with this collection. I'll go into this in a little bit more detail, but our research was designed around sort of complementing this existing collection with the hope that given better context through our excavations, we might be able to make sense of some of this stuff and actually use it and have it be a little bit more informative both for us and our researchers in this area. So in designing this research, besides trying to complement the existing data, I had a few intersecting and layered research questions that were framed by previous discussions and interests I talked about. These are basically how did different labor groups actively support, challenge, or negotiate power hierarchies at the company or power hierarchies in company control through daily labor, public and leisure practices? How did regional consolidation and centralization of resources and power affect labor organization and community social structure and relations? How did the particularities of settlement and life on the American far west necessitate negotiations and transformation of gender roles? Specifically I'm interested in conceptions of masculinity at this time because this is a predominantly male community and these ideologies and understandings of gender are intimately intertwined with labor. And then how did pluralistic sites like this work as places of culture contact, negotiation and change in the American west? So again these questions with these questions I'm kind of hoping to get to I'm hoping to position laborers as active agents in the construction of an emerging industrial California landscape. One that's still highly visible to us today. And the hope is to see how different social positions based on intersecting features of identity framed interactions between different labor groups at this particular site. And in doing this I hope to go beyond constructions of industrial labor relations and power that are framed in overly simplistic power over and resistance models. So I'll get to our fieldwork. Again we designed our fieldwork to kind of complement the existing data as well as aim to recover data that would inform those research questions that I talked about. And very broadly the green dots are the ones we added to the red dots that were excavated in the past. We excavated a total of 12 units from across the site with at least one unit in each of the major key domestic social and the key domestic and social spaces across the site. And in some previously untested areas like the kiln fronts there are a lot of storage there. So I've mentioned that I'm still very much working through this material. All of this is for preliminary. But I think there are some interesting patterns and differences between the material that are starting to emerge. So I'll discuss these in kind of relationship to discuss these by talking broadly about these different spaces that we investigated. So when we look at the manual labor's cabins that's what I'm calling them. This area down here I only circled one. It's this area as well. There's two of them. We find that and these are the spaces that would have been occupied first by Irish immigrants and later by Spanish and Italian immigrants. It seems first of all that there's very few faunal remains and almost no ceramics. So meeting what we expected it seems like the workers are all eating in a shared mess hall cookhouse type feature. There is however quite a large amount of evidence for alcohol consumption which is not super surprising. That's pretty common in the American far west like this. But it seems that the workers are drinking mainly wine and beer. That's predominantly what the glass assemblage is comprised of. We also recovered a fair amount of clothing items mostly Proser shirt buttons which are common on work wear. Overall clips, belt buckles and Levi's jeans rivets. That's what that is right there. And these are important lines of evidence for thinking about masculinity because working class clothing, activities and bodies had gender meeting and implications for readings of masculinity during this time period where class divisions were emerging that had very specific gender ideologies attached to them which I'll talk about a little bit more in a sec. So if I can speak sort of very grossly it is seem it looks like people living at these workers' cabins were participating in what some scholars have called a working class masculinity of the time. That was rooted in things like not only the type of labor you did but rooted in things like drinking and gambling and very particular types of dress. So this becomes a little bit clearer when we compare it to some of the stuff that we are finding in the manager's household. Again, that's over in this area. So the manager's household seems to have been a private residence versus the workers' cabins that were shared. And there is evidence of food consumption going on there. We found a fair amount of faunal remains and ceramics. And while it's unclear food is actually being prepared there it does seem clear that the people living there are eating separately from where the manual laborers are eating. What's interesting is that the material traces for the types of activities that are happening here at this manager's household are actually quite similar to those found at the workers' cabins. There's a fair amount of evidence for drinking, gambling, pipe smoking and even the evidence for clothing seems very similar to that found at the workers' cabins. We have the same kind of proser buttons and Levi's rivets. This is interesting because these activities and materials, as I mentioned, were associated with this kind of working class masculinity and are traditionally at odds with the practices of gentility that 19th century Victorian America would say is more appropriate for someone of the managerial class. When we look a little bit closer at the materials though there are differences between what we're seeing at the manager's versus the workers' cabins. Whereas the workers were drinking a lot of wine and beer, it appears that the manager was drinking more spirits, hard alcohol and there are types of alcohol represented there that were not found at all at the workers' cabins. In this case, there's a bottle of snops right there. The food remains are also different. As expected, we're seeing higher value cuts as soup and brazing cuts that dominate the workers' food deposits. There are some distinct markers of difference as well, which I think are best exemplified in this bone cuff or collar link which is sort of a classic sign of managerial labor because these items would have been very easily lost in any kind of manual labor. We also recovered parts of a clock down here which has sort of obvious both practical and symbolic implications for industrial labor. I think it's kind of interesting because on the one hand we have managers that seem to be eschewing the practices of Victorian gentility that their class and status would suggest that they should embody. But they're also doing very specific things to mark their spaces, practices and dress in ways that distinguish themselves and separate themselves from the manual laborers. But I think it's important to consider that it's likely that the kiln manager even though that person changed through time probably held a lower labor position within the lime industry at some point. It was common for workers to move up in the company hierarchy as they gained experience and it's possible that the manager had even previously lived in the shared workers' cabins before attaining this higher position. So I think this blending of practices and markers highlights the limitations of thinking of these workers in terms of these kind of rigid social groups and to reconcile about how we actually do that. And it highlights the need to think about the ways in which things like class, gender and power and the materials in which they're meshed are highly fluid and contextual. At a broader level, there seems to have been sort of a fairly clear separation of work and leisure activities at the site. There was almost no evidence for drinking, smoking or gambling or anything like that in the units that we put I think are sort of strictly work spaces in the Kiln and Coopridge area. This could be read and traditionally would be read as sort of the power of the company to control labor. That's how archaeologists have tended to interpret this kind of stuff. But I actually think that's kind of a narrow reading of what might be going on here because the presence of large quantities of alcohol bottles and even things like opium pipes that were recovered in some worker spaces suggests that workers consumed these things fairly freely and with little concern of being seen and with little intervention from the company as long as they were being consumed in non-work related spaces. They were doing that in the cabins and in the cookhouses and in some outside spaces like the cistern. This isn't necessarily typical of what you see in other company towns during this time period where company paternalism was seen as a way of increasing economic efficiency and profits companies often attempted to control worker activities not only in the workspace but also in their domestic spaces. So I'm hesitant to sort of see this pattern as rigid control and labor compliance to company policies. Again I'm trying to think of ways and work from an assumption that workers have agency and power in these situations and I think this broader pattern of how different spaces are used could be interpreted as coming from worker choice and preference. I think in this particular context it's quite possible that skilled workers exercised their power to engage in activities of their choosing while at home or in the mess hall even if those were at odds with company policies but workers chose to refrain from those activities while on the job for lack of better words. This different reading is based on a different set of assumptions about industrial workers because I think if we understand laborers, industrial laborers work as skilled craft as I've suggested it should be and could be it's very likely that the workers could have prided themselves in the quality of the work they produced and in an effort to create the highest quality line either out of this pride or out of a desire to keep their job in a competitive market the manual laborers themselves may have chose to refrain from social and leisure activities while in these workspaces. So again this is at odds with the traditional reading which would have industrial laborers constructed as kind of unskilled pawns that are just exploited by capitalists and from this traditional perspective laborers are seen as always being at odds with the company and its rules and agency is sort of seen as it's seen in the subversion or resistance to company policies but I think we need to at least consider the idea that it may be the workers themselves that are defining the appropriate use of space and it's complicated because it's hard to say who wins in this situation even if the workers are setting the term so to speak they're following a pattern of spatial use that would have benefited and likely been supported by the managers in the company so who has the power here who's being duped if anybody can this be read as an informal compromise where the company does not police worker practices at home and in shared social spaces as long as those practices are contained in those areas and do not extend to the workspaces I don't really know yet but it's forcing me to think about the complicated and multidirectional and very situational nature of power that's probably more realistic than our sort of traditional understanding of power over or control and resistance that tend to dominate archeological interpretations of industrial worksites and this is one area I want to work on going forward to see if there's any evidence for changes in these practices over time to see how that's impacted by those macro shifts that I talked about earlier some interesting things are going on at the Cook House as well again, census data suggests that the Cook House was staffed by Chinese labor and the material evidence tends to support that we found a fair amount of objects either made in China or that were we know were important parts of the China trade that are essentially only found in this part of the site so we have glazed stonewares we have winter green rice bowls we have a Chinese whiskey bottle which is also the glazed stoneware there and so the the mess hall in the Cook House complex was likely an important space for worker interaction for multi-ethnic interaction and I think we've recovered some interesting traces of culture contact and negotiation which I will try to talk about now so here we have a number of examples that we recovered from what I'm calling the mess hall area of peckmarked ceramic vessels you can see the modifications there and I have to give Lori again credit for this she's the first one who saw these when she was helping me wash artifacts one day so thank you so peckmarked vessels like this are peckmarking vessels as a traditional Chinese practice and while its exact purpose has been debated it's often thought it's generally thought to be some sort of mark of ownership or something like that and there's evidence of this type of practice throughout the American west at sites Chinese diaspora sites what's interesting about these examples is that they don't follow the typical patterns that we see at other peckmarked vessels which is almost always a Chinese character that's being pecked into these vessels in this case we have a word pecked using Roman letters in a cursive style but it's not just any word either I don't know if you guys are reading this the same way we are but I see this word as Chao C-H-O-W this could be a name but no name Chao turns up in any of the census documents and I actually don't think that's what it is these are found on the top and bottom of plates in the word Chao short for Chao Chao was a common slang word for food at this time it still kind of is today but this slang word came about its etymology is tied directly through Chinese tied directly to Chinese and European interactions in railroad construction camps in the American west Chao is Chinese Pigeon English derived from a Cantonese word Sao which I'm probably saying wrong T-S-A which is a Cantonese word for food or mixed so here we have a word Chao that is derived from the Cantonese word for food written in Roman letters in cursive script using a traditional Chinese marking practice on the back of a British ceramic found at an American work camp I think that's a pretty cool artifact and we have a number of them that's a different plate right there with the same Chao marking in some ways it's kind of a whole aspect of the California story after the gold rush all wrapped up into one artifact and it's certainly an interesting object to explore ideas of culture contact change and hybridity in the early industrial California but the question becomes what are these two marks right? was it the Chinese cook or was it a European immigrant worker they both would have interacted with this object but in different ways and again I apologize I don't really know yet and actually I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to say with any sort of degree of confidence but there are some other marks which turned up not quite as well that I think actually might be evidence of learning to do this peck marking complete or at least to me kind of an illegible symbol there and then here we have sort of very rough crude pecking at the bottom of this mug so this may be evidence of European immigrant labor learning from the Chinese cook how to mark vessels in a mess hall situation where these objects were probably shared or at the very least sort of communal but again I don't know yet I need to do more work on this and hopefully it'll be clarified as we work through the rest of this material and get a better idea on the specific context of that particular structure I fully realize that's a very sort of optimistic and idealized picture of Chinese and European immigrant interactions in the American West and we do have evidence material evidence that those interactions were not always quite as friendly we put one unit in this cold what I think was a cold room structure that was located just outside of the cook house and we found one of the interesting things we found in there was this overall button which I don't know if you can see that well but on the overall button is basically a rooster wearing overalls there's a picture of it down there with his chest out very proudly and it says camp bustum above there which is actually the name of a jeans company for that time period but it's also very clearly linked to unions and the idea of busting unions and things happening at that time and that's even made more explicit by this advertisement where it very proudly says union made for camp bustum jeans so this artifact is in one way a sort of very interesting pro-labor item that has implications for the conversations we're having on labor relations at the site but issues surrounding labor and unions at this time period also intersect with ideas and issues surrounding race and ethnicity one of the big reasons behind unions in California at least was to combat job loss that was at least stated and at least thought by many people to be due to influx of Chinese labor coming into California and then working at low labor rates low labor wages and it's this kind of thinking that led to things like the Chinese Exclusion Act and all that kind of stuff the violence towards Chinese and Chinese neighborhoods here in California as I mentioned is also made even more explicit in the advertising for camp bustum overall so here we have a jean tag here where it very proudly again notes that it's made by white labor only so the context of where this button was found so part of the cook house complex so essentially the Chinese workspace makes me think that it may have purposefully been worn if not left by another laborer to convey a message to the Chinese cook and even if it wasn't purposeful I think the selection of this brand and the wearing of this sort of symbol over the more popular and widely available Levi's jeans at this time period is saying something about labor and race relations not only at this site but in the state as a whole and again something I want to look more into as we let me go back there for a sec as we get a little bit a better picture idea and a picture of the depositional context and history of this particular structure so ultimately though when it comes to these artifacts and especially the chow marks I think they're interesting examples of culture contact and negotiation that supports the idea that these industrial work camps which were pluralistic sites composed of diverse groups of people need to be considered as these important areas for culture contact and change oops alright so I'll just kind of wrap things up briefly with talking about how we've tried the public engagement efforts we've made with this project so from the beginning it was a collaborative effort with state parks we designed it not only with that existing collection in mind but also with considerations of park management needs and interpretive needs and a big goal of this again as I mentioned was doing fairly minimally invasive work to sort of inform that larger collection also along with Lori and Trent we've started working with Dayalinda Adal who's the director the executive director of the Portuguese studies program here on campus to help us put us in contact with Portuguese communities here in the Bay Area of which there are many and here on campus and in the Bay Area essentially there's also she's also helping to put us in contact with the Portuguese historical museum in San Jose and we're hoping that we can create a dialogue with these groups here in the Bay Area and through Dayalinda we've learned that there is a strong push right now for work that's being done to highlight the contributions that Portuguese immigrants had to California history and their participation in the lime kiln industry is essentially not really well known at all everyone I talked to is surprised to find that there's Portuguese labor involved here not just in sort of the better known whaling and agricultural and dairy industries so we're also hoping that we can display some of the artifacts and some of this these ideas about Portuguese involvement in the lime kiln industry in this Portuguese history museum down in San Jose so working on state parks we also made an effort to engage with the public in as many ways as possible while we were there not only so we could talk about what we were doing but so we could sort of gain knowledge and understandings with people that use this park and know it much better than we do this was logistically challenging it's fairly hard to get to this area and actually the exact part where we were working is technically closed so we just got a lot of mountain bikers going by very quickly worried that we were rangers gonna give them a ticket but quite often we did have people enough to come up and talk to us and a lot of these people will hike these trails fairly frequently and I've gotten to know them quite well in fact tomorrow I'm going down there to do a talk in a third grade class who is the daughter of a woman who constantly kind of came to this area to check out what we were doing and talk to us about what we were doing so that's been really great and informative for me as well to learn from these people who live in this area we've also did structured and guided tours of our work while the excavations were going on with a dosing group so these are the interpretive docents for while the ranch state park and this has been great because they know that these kilns exist up on the hill miles away from where they actually work but their focus is really on the dairy operation that's at the part of the park right off the highway right next to the parking lot so they actually don't really know that much about the lime kilns and they were very eager to learn a lot about what we were finding and the things that we were thinking about and again I'm actually going down there tomorrow piggybacking on that elementary school trip to give them a talk at their docents meeting so that they can be better informed about what we found integrate that into their interpretations and again so I can learn more from them and then they're very excited about incorporating some of the materials and findings that we've uncovered into their interpretive center down at while the ranch and I think that's an important next step where we're working with state parks now we want to put an interpretive display up at the actual site because the main question we got from people as they came through was what is this stuff like what are these giant ruins that are sitting up here because as you can see there's actually still fairly substantial architecture standing and a lot of people just have no idea what it actually is as a result a lot of people go poking around and climbing in the kilns and on top not only is that dangerous for the site but it's extremely dangerous for themselves these things are really only being held together by roots so we're hoping that if we put up a nice interpretive display with an artistic reconstruction that might actually keep people from poking around too closely and then we're working with state parks to possibly clear the vegetation and do high resolution either 3D scanning or other sorts of imaging to record the kilns in their current state and then to possibly do some sort of display on that at the interpretive center where it's much more accessible for visitors so that's where I'll leave it I think I'm out of time oh I skipped the future plans so thank you again I really hope that you have feedback and ideas and concerns that you can talk to me about but I'll also answer any questions you might have thanks thanks again thanks from the few artifacts you showed us, by the way, thanks very much for doing that with us Mr. Candidline said it was fun the manager's house looked like it was a very different setup in that it actually looked like a family living it wasn't just a guy I mean a marble it probably has to you too and I'm assuming it's a family so it's going to be the odd man out of you though just based on time I don't know if you noticed I skipped a whole labor group there's a household in this area which I don't want to call them skilled labor which is what they're often referred to as because as I mentioned I think everyone is skilled labor in some ways but there's another household here that it's almost intermediate to the stuff we're seeing at the manager's household in the workers' cabins evidence for family at the manager's household the marble is really the only thing that might suggest that that's not necessarily a sign of a child that could have been used in gaming or gambling or something like that and the historical record suggests that this place was almost all single men, interestingly we did excavate, we put a unit in here we found a brooch which again, not always evidence of women but then we found two examples of a baby bottle so there we do actually have evidence that there were families at this site and so that's a whole different social dynamic, I think that's why we're seeing food, preparation, consumption I think we might have actually come in on like a full kitchen in this structure over here no, no I don't think so, yeah Laurie, there a rooster button I had another thought yeah 1885 and 1897 were both years of the rooster oh I never even thought of that you know, it was only when I saw the picture again, I'm like wow, that looks a lot like representative that's really interesting that's really interesting going on there if it could possibly be imagine if it's the clothes clothing yeah yeah who's working with guys who could be talking about labor issues and what double work that does yeah, no that's really, I never even thought of that, but that would be really cool we were all changing our Zodiac the Zodiac app interesting then to also tie back laborers that you've got birth years for yeah it just popped into my head and I did a quick search 1885 and 1897 both key dates and that's solidly solidly in these deposits for sure just given that you've got this really interesting thing going on with Chinese practices being made accessible right, yeah, no that would actually work a lot better with that that would be fun to explore for sure yeah, thanks, that's fun I haven't been able to track that down yet surprisingly for as big of an industry as this was, I haven't found very good corporate records or anything for these industries so I don't have the number itself, there are some mentions and anecdotes about how the manual laborers were paid and it kind of groups them all in together so I'm sure there were internal sort of work hierarchies within the manual laborers right, the archers and the barrel loaders and the quarters and all that kind of stuff but when they're discussed in the documentary record they're just kind of lumped together they do talk however about them being paid only once a year as a way to keep them at the site so that they didn't leave right, so that's one way there's lots of stuff, what's that? so that's something we've been talking about it's very likely that, so it's hard to make lime well during rainy seasons, you can't get it wet during the process so it's very likely that there were sort of busier and slower times but that's something Lori and I have been talking about, trying to situate especially with the Portuguese labor, how there might be how people might be sort of coming and going between you know, fishing, whaling, daring lime working or are they working in this just long enough until they get enough money to buy their own land for one of those other activities that's a question that we've been bouncing around that we haven't fully fleshed it out yet so we don't know the answer to it these classes could be an interesting way to talk about how labor community is working if there's you know, maybe not as an actual wage difference but very strategic performances of class hierarchy between like a manager and a skilled laborer there's one newspaper article which a student that worked with me in the field actually found and sent to me and I think it's somebody who is occupying this space for a limited period of time um it talks about him coming with his family to this area and it's basically him he got, I forget the exact details but he had to leave the lime operation and so he was selling a bunch of this stuff so he says, if you want to buy this stuff you have to come to the same items lime kilns and pick it up so it's great because we kind of get an idea of what he had he had things like pianos, lamps so there is there's stuff going on with the questions that you're asking that's definitely an area we want to flesh out more as we dive deeper into the documentary records and stuff like that it was a combination of them running out of, they didn't run out of lime they ran out of wood to burn the lime and at the same time they were inventing new kilns and lime outcrops in places like Oregon and Washington so it became cheaper to actually ship it from there down to the Bay Area in California than to produce it locally Thank you, and just by the way the mousse created very much a shape like that is also a simple approach of mine You're right and you were kind of an idea I'm just trying to hold the sedation on a button I was just thinking about our sets of lime making especially in light of Andy's comments or a question about the seasonality of it do you have evidence of all ford and charcoal production as in the earlier stage because I'm just thinking in the context that I'm more familiar with with lime production in your student history the idea is usually that they're producing charcoal because it burns hot and evenly and obviously they're not using kilns at all so it's a great situation but I was just wondering that's also super labor intensive Yeah, no we recovered charcoal from the site basically every unit we put in there was evidence of charcoal but as far as I know from the industry across the whole area that wasn't the common practice it was raw wood and we have pictures of oxygen carrying massive loads of wood if you don't So I guess a good question is why are they not doing that is that there's no local charcoal industry to draw off of I do know that they contracted out with lumbermen to acquire some of them Yeah, that's a good question but as far as I know that's not what they're doing Just to mention where the Chinese employees were living as opposed to the Portuguese which I apologize the Portuguese and Italian fairly complicated were living in a shared workers' cabin so these were basically two one-room cabins and they would just have chunks inside of them the cookhouse so we do have not from this site but we do have a couple documents that talk about in almost all cases across the industry the Chinese cooks live separately in the cookhouse and so we are we can see like we recovered a wintergreen rice bowl we did find some domestic type artifacts I'm always hesitant to make that direct connection between material and ethnicity but in the broader context it seems that the Chinese labor and it's almost always just one cook as far as we can tell from the census were living in the cookhouse or right next to it but particularly Asian workers were segregated young other workers I asked because there are the two different workers' cabins which look like they're about a hundred feet apart from one another and so I'm wondering if there was a purpose to that division that's something I'm considering like was it all the Portuguese here and the Italians here I don't know I don't know if we'll be able to say that with any certainty with any sort of negative confidence I think it was kind of just like sort of the geography the operation grew over time so it started with two kilns and grew to three kilns so it's likely that they were modifying added structures over time so I think one of these is probably earlier than later I haven't figured out which one yet that was the second question which was do you have an impression of the way that the site changed over time so that's definitely something I want to look at but it's going to be hard to do that until I've made the process of all the material so we're not quite there yet and I don't know if it's clear on this map but when you're out there today it's hard to tell but these are basically all in the same elevation so you have all these sort of domestic spaces in a line right here this is down in like a little flat all the area so how about that I need to situate yourself a little bit better I need to take like a really good landscape photo but it's hard to do would there be archival sources in italy or portugal that could I mean in northern america we're a huge thing for us I certainly hope so and the way that I mentioned is actually in portugal it's going to be back soon she's supposed to kind of that she's doing her own work keeping an eye out for that kind of stuff so she's looking to see if there's I asked her specifically to look at portugese kiln technology or to see if there's I gave her a list of names and to see if there's any evidence that they were working in this industry before they came over or anything like that right now we want the the resources to do that in italy certainly something that would be interesting hopefully we can do that in secret but we are trying to do that in portugal right now that's why I'm doing this talk thank you guys very much