Protecting Michigan State's Material Culture
Take a moment to think about what kinds of materials you’d expect to find in a garbage dump from 2018. Did plastic immediately spring to mind? About 300 million tons of plastic are produced globally each year, only about 10% of which is recycled (1). …
This summer, Cowles House, MSU’s oldest standing building, is due to get a facelift. As part of this remodeling, crews will remove a few trees from around and inside the building and expand the west wing. In preparation for this work, I have been researching …
As our regular readers know, the Campus Archaeology Program has been deeply engaged in chronicling the culinary past of our forebears at Michigan State University. Our work involving archaeological analysis of food remains found on campus and archival research detailing historic foodways on campus culminated last year in an 1860s MSU luncheon reconstruction (detailed here and here). Prepared by MSU Culinary Services and MSU Bakers, we had a delectable spread of historically-based dishes upon which to dine and enjoy.
The one downfall of the historic luncheon was the limited guest list. While we were able to invite people from across the campus, our budget limited us to about thirty guests. One of the primary objectives of the Campus Archaeology Program is public outreach, and although we documented the luncheon on our blog and on other social media (such as Facebook and Snapchat), this still deprived the general public of the opportunity to taste these dishes and interact with the past on a sensory level. Chef Jay Makowski, who helped prepare the luncheon, came up with the brilliant idea to feature certain dishes in the MSU ON-THE-GO Food Truck. We thought this was a modern, trendy, and accessible way to help MSU students, faculty, and other members of public connect with the past.
Therefore, in collaboration with MSU Culinary Services, we are excited to announce that variations of historic dishes will be available as options of the MSU Eat At State ON-THE-GO Food Truck. These “Throwback Thursday” and “Flashback Friday” special lunch events will feature versions of some of the foods served in the 1860s luncheon.
The menus include a few favorites from last year’s lunch: potato croquettes (deep-fried balls of mashed potatoes), codfish balls (basically potato croquettes with cod mixed in), and chow-chow (a delicious sweet vegetable relish).
A new menu item is the “shooter sandwich” with roast turkey, a pressed meat sandwich that was a popular during the early 1900s. We featured roast turkey with oyster stuffing at the original historic luncheon, and this is a convenient “on-the-go” version of the dish. Another new dish includes a pressed beef epigram. An epigram is traditionally a breaded and fried cutlet of lamb; our version features a twist by using pressed beef, a popular dish that was served at 19th-century MSU banquets. Other hearty, traditional foods featured include smoked chicken drumsticks and a pork sausage roll.
We hope this will be a great way to engage with the public and make learning about the past an exciting experience. If you would like to “taste the past,” then come by the MSU ON-THE-GO Food Truck for some Throwback Thursday and Flashback Friday fun!
The ON-THE-GO Food Truck serves lunch from 11:30am – 1:30pm. The Rock is located just north of the Red Cedar River on Farm Lane, and 1855 Place is located at 550 S Harrison Rd, East Lansing. The menu schedule is listed below:
ON-THE-GO Food Truck “Throwback Thursday”/“Flashback Friday” Schedule
Thursday, March 29 (at the Rock)
Potato Croquette with Chow Chow
Shooter Sandwich with Roast Turkey
Smoked Chicken Drumstick with Herb Roasted Red Skin Potato
Friday, April 13 (at 1855 Place)
Potato Croquette with Chow Chow
Shooter Sandwich with Roast Turkey
Fresh Pork Sausage with Chow Chow on Pub Roll
Thursday, April 19 (at the Rock)
Codfish Balls with dipping sauce
Pressed Beef Epigram
Smoked Chicken Drumstick with Herb Roasted Red Skin Potato
Friday, April 27 (at 1855 Place)
Codfish Balls with dipping sauce
Pressed Beef Epigram
Fresh Pork Sausage with Chow Chow on Pub Roll
(And don’t worry – if throwback foods aren’t your thing, the Food Truck will also feature their famous smoked cheddar burger each of these days.)
Author: Susan Kooiman
A few weeks ago, at the end of February, areas surrounding the Red Cedar River flooded causing substantial damage to many homes, businesses, and areas of MSU. The combination of unseasonably warm weather (which melted the prior weeks heavy snow) and heavy rains resulted in …
Mason jars are having a moment. If you’ve attended a wedding (particularly the barn variety) or eaten at a brunch establishment in the last decade, chances are you’ve consumed a beverage out of a Mason jar. What the youngest among us may not realize is …
Take a long look at the objects in the picture below. What do you think they are?
I bet that your first guess was just a little bit off. They are not small hand-cuffs (as they were originally labeled in the lab!), buckles, or tiny horseshoes. They are actually hardware from a little discussed, yet constantly used, object found in every home: a bed stand! If you were wrong, don’t feel bad, I did not know the correct answer either until Campus Archaeologist Lisa Bright pushed me toward the solution.
Beds have been around for a very long time. They can be found in most households, and are used every day, yet they are rarely discussed unless you have back problems (Wright 1962). Especially in college dorms, where beds are one of the few pieces of furniture present, they are essential for every day life. Everything from eating to studying, writing, relaxing, or posing for photos with eleven of your best friends all take place on a bed. They are also the perfect platforms for pranks. Speaking from experience, nothing is better than waking up your friend once he has been thoroughly plastic wrapped to his bed. As such, beds have a story to tell about the past, a perspective that helps us to understand the experiences of early students at MSU.
Recovered during excavations at Saint’s Rest, the objects above provide one of our few glimpses of early beds on MSU’s campus. These “D”-shaped fixtures, typically made from cast iron, were one half of a two-part system to hold pieces of a bed stand together. The circular end was fitted into a similar shaped slot in the side rail, so that the short square protrusions faced outward. These protrusions then slotted into a metal face plate attached to the bed post, forming the first tool-free bed stand (Taylor 2016). This technology, invented after the civil war, made bed stands more portable, as they were easy to break down and re-build in a different location. But, since the hardware was made of heavy metal, it was costly to ship. By around 1900, a lighter version, similar to those used today, was invented (Taylor 2011).
In these early days, dorm rooms were often filled to the brim with students. Up to 4 students would sleep in a room in Saint’s Rest, using only two beds. Two young men would share one bed, continuing (I assume begrudgingly) the family tradition of sleeping together (MSU Archives Exhibit 2012; Wright 1962). Unfortunately, few images from within Saint’s Rest exist, so it is unknown what type of mattresses these bed frames supported, or what other activities may have taken place on them.
While it is clear that they were used for sleeping, easily dis-assembled bed frames also aided in at least one early MSU tradition, room stacking. An ingenious form of initiation, freshmen new to the campus would occasionally return to their rooms to find all of their things stacked into one large tower of furniture and personal belongings (MSU Archives Exhibit 2012). Not only were their possessions stacked, but it was done in such a way as to make re-assembling the room and sleeping in it difficult. As one student who returned to a stacked room recounts, “It was past twelve o’clock that night before I got my bed down so as to sleep on it” (MSU Archives Scrapbook Page, 1902).
Oh, the tales these beds could tell if we could only re-create a bit more of their life histories!
Author: Jeff Painter
References Cited
MSU Archives and Historical Collections:
2012 Exhibit- Dormitory Life: The First One-Hundred Years of Students Living on Campus. Created by Kim Toorenaar. http://onthebanks.msu.edu/Exhibit/1-6-D/dormitory-life/
1902 Scrapbook Page about Room Stacking Pranks, 1902. Created by George Newnes. http://onthebanks.msu.edu/Object/1-4-1156/scrapbook-page-about-room-stacking-pranks-1902/
Taylor, Fred
2011 “Furniture Detective: Hardware on Vintage Beds Crucial to Its Design and Function” http://www.antiquetrader.com/antiques/vintage_brass_bed_hardware_design/
2016 “The Nuts and Bolts of Bedding Down Through the Ages” https://www.liveauctioneers.com/news/columns-and-international/fred-taylor/nuts-bolts-bedding-ages/
Wright, Lawrence
1962 War and Snug: The History of the Bed. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
While a great many treasures have come from the Brody/Emmons complex (aka the East Lansing dump), the one that spoke to my heart will be of little surprise to our regular readers. It is a small stoneware crock with blue lettering that says “Kaukauna Klub, …
Today we think of soda, or as we say in these parts pop, as coming in a few standard sizes: 12 oz cans, 20 ounce bottles and 2-liter’s to name a few. But as I’m sure you’re aware, sizes have changed substantially over the last …
Here at CAP we think a lot about different ways of sharing our research. We can—and do—present at conferences, give public lectures, and publish site reports and journal articles. While these avenues are great for communicating our work to other experts, they are probably not the most effective ways of engaging the MSU community and the public. This blog is one way we communicate with the public about the campus heritage we uncover through our work. But how can we take this one step further and make the connection between campus heritage and campus space? One idea is to create an experience that turns MSU’s campus into a museum anyone can visit, with exhibits that not only showcase what we’ve discovered through archival and archaeological research, but also the processes involved in uncovering this knowledge.
The first iteration of this idea of campus as museum was msu.seum, a free mobile app that uses geopositioning to identify a user’s location on campus, point them to the nearest site of interest, and provide information on the history and archaeology of the site. Msu.seum was the outcome of collaboration between the Campus Archaeology Program, the Cultural Heritage Informatics (CHI) Initiative, and MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities and Social Science. The app was first designed and developed as part of the 2011 CHI Field School led by CHI director and MATRIX associate director Dr. Ethan Watrall. Content for msu.seum was developed by Dr. Goldstein and former Campus Archaeologist Terry Brock.
For my CAP project I have been working to update and help build a Campus Archaeology mobile experience on a new and improved platform that alleviates technical issues with the original msu.seum app and offers exciting new features. The new platform we are using is mbira, an open-source tool specifically designed for building and managing location-based and mobile cultural heritage experiences designed by MATRIX. The site we are building in mbira can be accessed as an app for Android and Apple devices, on mobile web browsers, and as a browser-based web app.
So, what exactly will the new Campus Archaeology mobile experience look like? The site has three major levels of organization: locations, exhibits, and explorations. Locations are the most basic level of organization. They appear as pins on an interactive map and are tied to real locations, including past and present campus buildings and sites CAP has excavated. When a user selects a location pin, they are provided with a description of the site’s history, similar to an artifact label in a traditional museum. Unlike traditional museums, locations also include a “Dig Deeper” section exposing the archaeological research that helped generate knowledge about that location, as well as a comment section. Our hope is that eventually users will be able to participate in conversations with us and other users to ask questions, share reactions, and contribute to our knowledge of campus sites.
Exhibits provide one option for users to experience locations. Exhibits connect several locations together based on an underlying theme. To date, we have created five permanent exhibits for the mobile experience. Four of these correspond to eras in campus history including Beginnings (1855-1870), Foundation (1870-1900), Expansion (1900-1925), and Legacy (1925-1955). Our fifth permanent exhibit, Discovery, includes locations associated with CAP’s archaeological investigations from 2005 to the present. Explorations provide another way for users to experience locations. Unlike exhibits, explorations join together locations intended to be experienced in a particular sequence. This feature could be used to create a self-guided tour.
So far, my work on this project has primarily focused on building the permanent exhibits. Last semester I updated content previously featured on msu.seum with findings from new investigations. I have also created new content that reflects more recent field schools and sites excavated since 2011. I am now putting the finishing touches on the permanent exhibits including attaching historical photos from MSU Archives and photos of artifacts and archaeological investigations to each of the 27 locations currently added to the site.
As we develop this Campus Archaeology mobile experience, we are continuing to think of new ways to build and expand. We hope to create temporary thematic exhibits and explorations that can be featured at different times throughout the year. One idea is to highlight and connect current CAP research—including research on sustainability, food, and gender—to locations on campus. Another idea is to create a Halloween exploration to coincide with the Haunted Tour Campus Archaeology cohosts with the MSU Paranormal Society.
While this project is still in development, we are looking forward to launching the site soon. In March, Dr. Watrall will be presenting a beta version at the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries conference in a paper titled “Towards an Approach to Building Mobile Digital Experiences for University Campus Heritage and Archaeology.” He will also be presenting on building mobile experiences for heritage and archaeology in this invited lecture. Stay tuned for the full launch of the CAP mobile experience later this year!
Author: Mari Isa
Today is World Anthropology Day, sponsored by the American Anthropological Association. This year we have decided to highlight the non-CAP research our director(s) and fellows conduct. Lynne Goldstein On this World Anthropology Day, I am doing archaeology, but differently than I have done it in …