Protecting Michigan State's Material Culture
Whenever we at CAP come across an interesting artifact, it sparks the inevitable, if inelegant question, “what was this thing doing on our campus?” It’s a simple question, but I’ve often found as I delve into researching an artifact that the journey of that object …
In Part 1, I introduced how porcelain is produced and its long history in Asia and Europe. Today, after centuries of history, porcelain finally comes to the Americas (what a surprise!). Porcelain first came to the Americas not long after it made its appearance in …
At Campus Archaeology, we often encounter laboratory glassware in contexts such as the veterinary and botanical laboratories, excavations near lab row, and even the Gunson assemblage. This is not surprising, as MSU has a long history of scientific research. However, the presence of lab glass presents us with some interesting challenges as we attempt to answer questions such as: what kind of equipment is this from? When is it from? What might it have been used for?
In order to begin identifying the large quantities of lab glass in our collections, it helps to understand what forms of glassware exist and what they are used for. Beakers and flasks are used to hold reagents for chemical reactions. Graduated cylinders are used for measuring the volume of samples. Retorts are used for distillation, pipettes for transferring fluids, condensers for cooling hot liquids or vapors, and so on. As we encounter distinctive pieces in our assemblages, we can compare their shapes and sizes to catalogs of laboratory glass to try to identify the type of equipment they came from.
Sometimes, the color or thickness of glass might help us identify its use. Dark brown or amber (actinic) glass might indicate a bottle used for chemical storage. Actinic glass is often used for storage purposes because it blocks ultraviolet and infrared radiation that causes chemical degradation. In contrast, laboratory glass used for experiments is colorless and transparent to allow for viewing of chemical reactions. Very thick, heavy-walled glass may indicate glass used in pressure reactions, while thin, flat glass tends to be used for more delicate objects such as microscope slides.
As I learned in my research, even the type of glass and its place of manufacture can provide some information about an artifact. Ideally, laboratory glass should be resistant to cracking due to thermal stress. When glass is heated or cooled rapidly, the temperature of the external surface changes more quickly than the internal surface. This causes unbalanced expansion of the glass, which can produce cracks. Early 19th century glassmakers addressed this problem by producing thin-walled glassware made of lime glass. Thinning the walls reduced the temperature differential between inner and outer surfaces, limiting the risk of cracks.
At the end of the 19th century, a German chemist named Otto Schott discovered a more elegant solution to the problem of thermal stress. Between 1887 and 1893, Schott and his associates Carl Zeiss and Ernst Abbe developed borosilicate glass, a type of glass composed of silica and boron trioxide that expands very little in the presence of heat. This heat-resistant property quickly made borosilicate, over lime glass, then the industry standard for laboratory glassware. Borosilicate glass was marketed as “Jena glass” after Jena, Germany, where it was developed.
The United States produced little of its own glassware in the 19th century. By 1902 at least one American company (Whitall Tatum & Co.) was also making borosilicate laboratory glass under the brand name of “Nonsol.” Several Whitall Tatum & Co. bottles with chemical names and formulas were recovered from the Gunson site. However, most American companies struggled to compete with German-made scientific glassware. It wasn’t until World War I when, economically cut off from Europe, America began to produce most of its own laboratory glass. A 1918 Bureau of Standards study of laboratory glassware showed five American brands of borosilicate glass (Macbeth-Evans, Pyrex, Nonsol, Fry, and Libbey) performed as well as German Jena Glass. All six borosilicate glass brands were more resistant to thermal shock than Kavalier, the most popular brand of lime glass.
Archival information on campus purchases of laboratory glassware is often limited. The archives do not always provide specifics about the types of laboratory glass that were being purchased or what they were used for. Sometimes, there are records that glass purchases were made—in the 1897 Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Trustees, for example, the records show that the veterinarian requested $100 worth of “glassware—test tubes, etc.,” but no other information is provided. Photographs of students and faculty working in various laboratories across campus can provide more direct evidence as to the types of glassware used around campus. A photograph of the bacteriology laboratory in 1905 shows a collection of bell jars, petri dishes, test tubes, glass reagent bottles, a microscope (and, I presume, microscope slides), and a large Erlenmeyer flask. A 1914 photograph of students in the chemistry laboratory shows an array of clear reagent bottles with glass stoppers (some helpfully labeled “Alcohol” and “Acid Acetic”), volumetric flasks, an Erlenmeyer flask, and a graduated cylinder.
Sometimes we are lucky enough to come across lab glass with makers’ marks. A piece of a flask or beaker with the mark “Schott & Gen” recovered from the Gunson assemblage probably refers to Schott & Genossen, the glass manufacturing company founded by Otto Schott and associates. This tells us that this item was manufactured after 1887, and was probably imported from Germany, likely before World War I when American production of borosilicate glassware became more common.
Recent excavations have provided us with an abundance of laboratory glassware. As we encounter these artifacts in our laboratory, we will continue to use some of the strategies described here to identify them and connect them with activities on campus.
Author: Mari Isa
References
MSU Archives & Historical Collections. UA 1 State Board of Agriculture/Board of Trustee Records. Board of Trustee Meeting Minutes Notes: 1897
Jenson, WB. The Origin of Pyrex. J. Chem. Educ., 2006;83:692-693.
Walker PH and FA Smither. Comparative Tests of Chemical Glassware, Technological Papers of the Bureau of Standards, No. 107, Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1918.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_glassware
http://www.rsc.org/eic/2015/07/pyrex-glass-borosilicate-laboratory
http://americanhistory.si.edu/science-under-glass/importing-innovation-glassmaking
Hi, I’m Jasmine Smith, and I’m a CAP undergrad intern this semester. I’ve been working with CAP since I participated in the Summer 2015 field school. I also did an internship during Fall 2015 where I examined the laboratory glass found at the Gunson site. …
It may seem unusual to dig up a pair of shoes, yet shoes are not totally uncommon on archaeological excavations. Just last week a report from Northumberland, England announced a find of more than 400 shoes discovered at the Roman fort of Vindolanda. Typically the entire …
On university campuses, all sorts of different items are present. One type of item that is commonly found but under-utilized are industrial ceramics. Also known as hotel wares, hotel china, or restaurant china, these ceramics are designed to be extremely tough and cheap, perfect for enterprises feeding a large number of people every day. Besides aspects of technology, these seemingly simple objects can provide archaeologists with an impressive amount of information, especially on a university campus with a deep history, such as Michigan State’s.
Developed sometime around the 1870’s and 1880’s in the United States, institutional wares are a vitrified and improved white stoneware, meaning that this type of ceramic is fired at a very high temperature, making it more glass-like or porcelain-like. Despite its glassier nature, these ceramics are extremely durable and do not break easily. Since they act more like glass, they are also less porous and do not absorb as many tiny food particles or oils, making them ideal for repeated and frequent use.
While some may see the presence of these wares on MSU’s campus as only signaling that, yes indeed, MSU fed lots of people every day, they can actually tell us much more. Archaeologically, hotel wares contain a number of small but time sensitive aspects, such as the development of a rolled rim in 1896, which can make them useful time markers that are helpful in dating archaeological assemblages found on campus. Beyond this simple application, they can also help inform us about changes in how students were provisioned on campus, and about the balancing act that is a university economy.
Students on campus have not always been supplied with everything food-related that they would need. They also did not always live in massive dorms full of hundreds of people. At the beginning of MSU, when the university was small and hotel wares were only an idea, student labor ruled as a way for the university to remain self-sufficient and also under-budget. Students also provided many of their own living items as they came to the university. At what point then, and why, did it become more economical to begin buying these ceramics to provision a growing student body? This is one question that these ceramics can aid in answering.
Institutional wares can also help us to recreate the student and faculty experience thru time at MSU. What was meal-time like for these students before giant cafeterias full of different restaurants became the locations for students to eat, socialize, or occasionally do some school work? For faculty as well, who could afford more refined tastes in dishware, did all faculty have the same access to nicer dinnerware or did some also make use of institutional wares as a way to stay under-budget themselves?
These items also do not remain undecorated, but are instead found with specific designs in specific colors. After 1908, when a method for decoration was adapted that did not weaken the glaze of these ceramics, institutional wares became increasingly customizable. This turned them not only into a utensil for eating, but a tool for branding as well. At MSU, we commonly see white dishes with bands of green near the rim, matching the university colors. As students would have interacted with these dishes almost every day, this may have been a subtle attempt to unify the student body behind a university brand that was, and still is, symbolized by those colors, green and white.
All of these are topics that institutional ceramics can help us to explore, topics that are critical for understanding how large institutions, such as a university, evolve through time, and how the experiences of those involved evolved with it.
Author: Jeff Painter
Reference:
Meyers, Adrian
2016 The Significance of Hotel-Ware Ceramics in the Twentieth Century” Historical Archaeology Vol. 50 Iss. 2 (2016) p. 110 – 126.
It’s that time again, meet the 2016-2017 CAP fellows. We’re excited to get to work on a batch of new projects this year, under the guidance of CAP director Dr. Lynne Goldstein. Lisa Bright: Lisa is a third year PhD student in Anthropology, returning for her …
I’ve been a member of Campus Archaeology Program since I started working on my Ph.D. in 2010. Next month, I graduate. The experience and knowledge I’ve gained as a member of CAP has been invaluable, and it has shaped my professional trajectory in many ways. …
I can’t believe I’m typing this, but next month I will graduate from MSU and be let loose into the world as a real, live Anthropologist. I have been very fortunate to be employed as a graduate researcher with CAP since 2010. As a physical anthropologist, I entered graduate school thinking I’d just study old bones but I have found a real love for historic archaeology. I credit CAP and Dr. Goldstein with fostering this interest in me. Each year with CAP has taught me something new, so Lisa suggested that I re-CAP (ha!) my time in my final blog post. In no particular order:
1) Gender on the historic campus – This project has consumed my CAP research for the past two years. This project taught me so much about the early female experience at MSU. It was incredible fun to dig through the University Archives, looking through scrapbooks and photos, trying to piece together the trials and lifeways of female students. Women were far from docile beings content with a sliver of the education their male peers were receiving! There were quite a few muckrakers and rabble rousers in the early female student crowd and it has been inspiring to read about their lives. The articulation of material culture excavated by CAP and the archival documents has been a welcome challenge, pulling me into a direction I never thought I’d go before my CAP involvement.
2) Privy research – Though I was not part of the initial excavation, I was tasked with doing background research on historic privies as part of the More Than Just Nightsoil poster presented at the MAC last year. I never knew privies were so interesting! I really enjoyed reading through published works on privies, as well as finding out about the laypersons who dig old outhouses. Something I previously may have dismissed as trivial or uninteresting (or, let’s face it, kind of gross) became something I still Google. Plus, I got to take photomicrographs of seeds recovered from the nightsoil! Any excuse to put something under a microscope gets me excited.
3) Excavation in the historic greenhouse – I’ve had the opportunity to excavate a lot of cool places on campus thanks to CAP, but the historic greenhouse (now demolished) was certainly the coolest. The CAP crew walked around inside, taking measurements and checking out the overgrown plants and ruins. To be inside this abandoned place on an otherwise thriving campus was definitely surreal.
4) Public Outreach – Over the years, I’ve done a lot of public outreach activities with CAP where we speak to schools or community groups. I think the best part of these events is that we continually learn how to present archaeology to the public in a way that is accessible yet also underscores the importance of the field. It’s easy for uninformed people to dismiss archaeological materials as “just” old stuff, but public outreach allows us to articulate why and how these items are linked to the past (and, critically, why people should care). Seeing the public, especially children, start to think about the past as it relates to the present is so satisfying. Human curiosity and critical thought is definitely stoked when holding an artifact.
5) Working with Dr. Goldstein and the CAP fellows – Okay, I promise I didn’t put this on the list to be a brown noser. I have met and worked with people through CAP that I probably wouldn’t have interacted with otherwise – we were in different cohorts, never took classes together, had wildly different research foci, etc. But, CAP brought me and some of my best graduate school friends together. Dr. Goldstein has always fostered an inclusive and fun environment in CAP meetings and she made me feel like I was part of a research team. I’ll remember CAP meetings as full of laughs, good-natured ribbing, and lots of game planning. I really appreciate Dr. Goldstein treating us like we all had something valuable to contribute, as well as letting us in on the inner workings of a university (e.g. telling us about meetings she had with campus operations folks, guiding us through setting up and advertising public outreach events, helping us find funding, and more).
6) Collaboration with University Archives – I think that going to the Archives was one of my favorite parts of CAP. Sometimes it was frustrating and sometimes I would spend a couple hours there and come away with no valuable information, but the feeling of flipping through old photos and scrapbooks will always stay with me. As a lover of all things old, I enjoyed putting on the little white gloves and diving into the stacks to see what I could find. Going to the Archives, especially in the winter, was kind of like a non-field archaeology in a way. I still got to dig around in other peoples’ lives!
7) Hanging out in the lab – The CAP lab is bursting with artifacts. Seriously, go check it out sometime when Lisa is down there. Bags and bags of artifacts sit on the benches waiting for cataloging and analysis. I did a very speedy analysis of artifacts from the Gunson assemblage for my gender project and it was so fun to just sit in the lab and see what came out of the bags. I’ve now blogged about Listerine bottles, nail polish toppers, and old doll heads – all things I never knew a single fact about before CAP! Any lab rat can tell you that there is a great satisfaction in identifying, labelling, documenting, and researching – the breadth and quantity of the materials excavated by CAP ensures that the lab rats will be happy for years to come. As someone who generally only handles artifacts from places far removed in time and space from my own experience, it was so cool to identify and research artifacts used by students who graduated from my same university.
Well, I could go on but I’ll leave the list at lucky number seven. It has been a fantastic and fulfilling experience to work as a CAP researcher for the past five years and I hope that I can continue to be associated with the program in some form in the future. I encourage all MSU Anthropology students to consider working with CAP at some point during your college careers. I’ve learned so much more than just the historical archaeology of our campus. Thank you to Dr. Goldstein, my CAP cohorts, and the University Archives for a collegial academic experience.
Author: Amy Michael
In my previous blog, I discussed the history of the Philip Kling Brewing Company of Detroit, inspired by fragments of two Kling beer bottles found in the Gunson house debris last summer. While the story of the Detroit brewing industry was interesting, it was all …