Protecting Michigan State's Material Culture
By Madelyn McKinney and Jerielle Cartales The Island School site, excavated by CAP in the summer of 2025, was filled to the brim with architectural debris from the schoolhouse’s destruction in the 1960s. Most of this was fairly generic: shards of plain window pane glass, …
Hi! My name is Jerielle and I’m a first year CAP fellow, working on my PhD in forensic anthropology. I have an undergraduate degree in biology and a masters degree in forensic anthropology. Unlike many other CAP fellows, my interests lean more towards (human) skeletal …
Hi, my name is Katie Simonson and I am one of the students taking part in the 2024 field school, where we are working on the site of the original observatory here on MSU’s campus. Part of the foundations were found earlier in May of 2023 by CAP, so we are expanding on the work already done. Our field school started on the 28th of May this year, and we went over the history of the site, safety, and got to know our team. We continued this on the next morning, but after that we began the pedestrian survey of the site.
A pedestrian survey is when we walk along the surface of the site to find artifacts on the surface. Since the site is in an area where many people occupy, that means the surface has been very disturbed since the time of the site and it is unlikely we would find any historic artifacts, but it is still important to look. We all walked along a transect, a straight line across the site, that was spaced out a meter apart, and flagged any artifacts we saw. Since the majority of us have never done a pedestrian survey before, we decided to flag all man made objects as practice. After we flagged the objects, we would map their position, take a picture of it, and describe the object using a program called KoboToolbox. If we found anything possibly historic then we put in an artifact bag, otherwise we would dispose of it.
As we predicted, we didn’t find many artifacts that could be historic. We found lots of modern trash including plastic wrappers, cardboard, paper cups, and cans. We also found a rodent bone. Some of the things we found were not historical but still interesting, so were kept by some of us for our own use. For example, I kept a broken cd and a beaded chain to make into a suncatcher. We did find some objects that could possibly be historic, such as pieces from glass vessels, metal bottle caps, and some pieces which were most likely from a dining hall plate. These were bagged for further analysis later.
The pedestrian survey might not have given us much insight into the history of the site, but it did allow us to become familiar with the area and the process of surface survey. On other sites which are less disturbed by modern human activity, it would be more likely to find more historic objects. It is important to know how much a site has been disturbed, because that can affect how we need to study the site.
I hope you enjoyed learning about the pedestrian survey of the 2024 observatory site, and if you are interested in learning more there are plenty of resources on this website about the history of the site and our work here.
This academic year has allowed me to explore several digital methods I had little to no knowledge about. This is partially due to my teaching position at MSU in the Lab for the Education and Advancement in Digital Research (LEADR). While in this position, I …
This past summer has been one of the busiest, if not the busiest, summers of my time as director of the MSU Campus Archaeology Program. While we did not have a field school as we generally run them every other year, a remarkable discovery was …
Holly Long
I love tea; I drink it every single day. It is warm, hydrating, and is known for healing properties. But the tea leaves most drink today are imported and are not indigenous to North America and are rarely grown here. Tea leaves, not including herbal blends, all come from the same plant, Camellia sinensis, a tropical flora not suitable to the drastic climatic changes found in Michigan. This plant grows at many altitudes and can be dried or roasted to produce the variety of “colors” we can purchase today. It has been utilized for medicinal and social consumption for centuries, depending on preparation and its caffeinated properties. Though it does contain caffeine, it has lower levels than coffee beans once it is brewed, making it a less popular drink among the caffeine addicted populations in North America.
But if we cannot grow this plant in Michigan, how could people have been drinking tea (dried leaves in water) for ages? While tea comes from Camellia sinensis, dried leaves, herbs, and berries steeped in water were consumed long before commercial tea plantations came to fruition. Other plants were used, depending on the local flora, to create ritual or nutritional drinks. The Yaupon, a relative in the Holly family, is the only native plant in Michigan to contain caffeine, allowing for its medicinal use. Caffeine is a toxin produced by plants to ward off insects and to stop them from eating the leaves but such low levels are almost harmless to humans (not including the caffeine addicted today). However, the effects can be felt and can provide short term energy and the feeling of being wide awake which made it ideal for rituals or being included in fasting periods. One example of archaeological evidence for the consumption of holly comes from outside of Michigan at the site of Cahokia, near modern-day St. Louis, Missouri. Known as a site where many individuals converge for ceremonial purposes (bringing a variety of trade goods with them), the ceramic pots left at the site were scraped and analyzed by archaeologists to determine their former contents. Substances such as caffeine and methylxanthines were detected and the ratios of these chemicals corroborates the use of the holly plant in these vessels. This confirms that people have been utilizing the plant life around them for hot and cold drinks for thousands of years for a variety of purposes.
But not all teas were used for its caffeine in rituals and fasting. Some teas were utilized for the nutrients they provided. In the harsh winters here in the north, food becomes scarcer and less various which means certain nutrient deficiencies might set in. Using the abundant pine needles in the area made tea that added much needed vitamin C back in the diet and provided a warm drink during cold times. Many plants in this area were known for their medicinal properties and were utilized by the native people to cure ailments of the stomach, throats, skin, and joints. Edible plants such as the yarrow, mullein, blackberries, wild rose, and honeysuckle and herbs like sage, mint, and rosemary can be dried and steeped or mashed into liquids to help ease different pains and issues. Many of these plants were not found during the winter and were dried to preserve them much like the leaves of Camellia sinensis are dried and oxidized for tea-drinking purposes.
Not only could these plants be consumed but they were used to heal wounds on the body as well through poultices. Autumn is the time of harvest, the perfect time to finish foraging for these plants and drying them in preparation of Winter. In the final few days of sunny weather, you can embrace the Michigander’s love of the outdoors and learn to drink these nourishing and healing plants that may grow in your own backyard.
References
(n.d.). Camellia sinensis. PLANTS RESCUE. https://www.plantsrescue.com/posts/camellia-sinensis
Bowers, C. (2020, March 6). Wild thing: Pine Needle Tea. Edible Communities. https://www.ediblecommunities.com/featured/wild-thing-pine-needle-tea/
Ching, T. (2021, November 9). How to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day with tea. https://tching.com/2021/10/how-to-celebrate-indigenous-peoples-day-with-tea/
Crown, P. L., Emerson, T. E., Gu, J., Hurst, W. J., Pauketat, T. R., & Ward, T. (2012). Ritual black drink consumption at Cahokia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(35), 13944–13949. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1208404109
Real Green Digital. (2018, July 2). 10 Michigan plants Native Americans used every day. PPM Tree Service & Arbor Care, LLC. https://ppmtree.com/2018/07/02/michigan-homeopathic-plants/
Wendell, M. T. (n.d.). The origins and history of tea: Where did tea originate? https://marktwendell.com/historyoftea
Wikimedia Foundation. (2023, October 24). Ilex vomitoria. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilex_vomitoria
Construction along Service Road in 2020 found a mid-20th-century midden. The artifacts found were associated with the history of temporary post-World War II student housing on Michigan State’s campus. After the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, or the GI Bill, became law, college enrollment increased …
As we near the end of the semester, I want to reflect on one of my favorite experiences of fall 2022: the Midwest Historical Archaeology Conference! This year’s conference was organized by: Dr. Michael S. Nassaney, Professor Emeritus of Western Michigan University; our own Director …
While cataloguing artifacts from Service Road, we stumbled across an intriguing piece of a milk glass jar featuring an applied color label with bright red and blue hues. I say it was intriguing because many of the artifacts we have left from Service Road are unlabeled or small fragments, providing few clues beyond their shape of what they once held or were used for. So it was no surprise that the faint etchings of letters and color on this container drew my eye – however, my intrigue quickly turned into bewilderment when I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what those letters said!
The mix of fading and unique font produced the perfect storm, which wasn’t helped by the fact that the bottle was missing most of its bottom, with only “DE / .A.” still visible. While this did clue us in that this bottle was “MADE IN U.S.A.”, if a maker’s mark existed, it was lost along with the whole back side of the jar. So we knew the letters were the key to solve this puzzle!
After some debate with another CAP fellow on whether the last two letters were a “ZA” or were not letters but “2A,” and the use of some eye drops to see if that would help clear up my vision, we decided it was time to try another strategy. First, we tried using the UV light method that Aubree, another CAP fellow, introduced in her blog last year – however, while we have seen great results on other artifacts, it wasn’t able to do the trick for us with this particular label. So we moved on to Plan B: holding up a good ole iPhone flashlight behind the label to provide some back light. And it worked!
We could now make out what we thought was an “R U T M Z A.” Although Plan C, or a quick google search, helped us realize we were a little off, as google suggested that what we were really looking for was in fact “NUTMEG” – and it was right! (And maybe a bit too smart for its own good!) And with that, our now our artifact is no longer a mystery, but one of a set of Dutch stylized spice jars, often purchased by collectors today.
To complement our struggles reading the label, our archival research similarly led us down a few rabbit holes, as these jars have been attributed to a few different companies, including McKee Tipp City and Hazel Atlas. However, after matching our artifact to a picture of a spice jar for sale online with its brand label still in place, we realized that they were likely made as part of Frank’s Dove Brand, by the Frank Tea and Spice Company, which produced spices, food extracts, food colorings, apple butter, sauces, olive oil, and olives – quite the array of goods! Originally started in 1896 by three brothers in Cincinnati, Ohio, who aimed to replace the purchase of bulk goods with smaller, self-sized products, you might be more familiar with their Frank’s® RedHot® buffalo sauce, a popular product still in stores today!
As for our artifact, and the production of nutmeg jars of the Dutch style, the trademark logo dates between 1938 and 1996. Although a big range, this overlaps with other dates we’ve found of other Service Road artifacts and gives us some insight into ingredients used for cooking – we can only imagine some of the nutmeg recipes used by the person who threw away this jar!
This past summer, the Campus Archaeology program had the opportunity to offer a field school to archaeology students from MSU and across the state—our first field school since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Directly taking part in ongoing CAP research into life in the …