Collections and Food Part I: What can anthropology tell us about the preparation of food?

November 22, 2016 by student

This blog post is the first installment of a blog series about food-related objects in the Wesleyan Archaeology and Anthropology Collections!

From extravagant White House state dinners to family gatherings during the holiday season, food is simultaneously a performance, an expression, and a place where people can find common ground. Food is a powerful social and political tool that brings people together, a symbol that defines and distinguishes cultural identities, and something that can hold profound meaning for individuals and societies. For this month’s blog post, we selected objects from the collections that were used in the preparation and presentation of food. Examining this material evidence reveals the significance of food to the customs and identities of the cultures that used each object.

Poi Pounder

This object was used to make poi, a staple food throughout Polynesia and a common part of Hawaiian cuisine. This pounder was made of volcanic rock and stands 20 cm high. Wesleyan obtained this object in 1940 from the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hi. Poi (pohaku ku’i ‘ai) is made by using a poi pounder to mash together baked taro against a wooden board and enough water to reach the desired consistency. The taro plant is culturally and spiritually significant to Hawaiians as well. Hawaiians believed that the taro plant was the elder brother to the very first Hawaiian that provided sustenance for his younger sibling. Therefore, care and respect in the process of growing, making, and eating taro symbolized proper relationships between family members, and between the people and the land. Through the performance of agriculture and the preparation of poi, Hawaiians were able to reflect their own temperament and character to the rest of their community. Not to mention, poi is also delicious! Read more about the cultural significance of poi to Hawaii’s indigenous peoples here.

California Cooking Basket

This woven cooking basket originates from one of the Northern California indigenous tribes (Hupa, Yurok) and was most likely created between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Because acorns were easy to grow and store, California tribes relied on them as a staple carbohydrate in their diet. To prepare acorns, they first had to be pounded into a meal, or fine flour. Cooking baskets were covered in acorn gruel so nothing would leak out while cooking and placed over hot rocks. Acorn meal and water was combined and boiled into a thick soup, or a version of porridge. Hungry for a quick snack? Before you run outside to grab a couple of acorns that the squirrels left behind make sure that you take the proper precautions to remove the natural tannins found in acorns! Wesleyan acquired this particular basket in 2004 as part of the Burford collection. Professor Gilbert Burford (1911 – 2002) was the E.B. Nye Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Wesleyan University (and a Wes alum, class of 1932) where he started teaching in 1936! Professor Burford also held a passion for Native American Indian culture and artifacts. Not only does this cooking basket provide insight into the culinary practices of Northern California indigenous tribes, the intricate weaving patterns of the basket also reflect the tribes’ faculties for technology and innovation.

Cooking Vessel

This ceramic cooking vessel was created during the Proto-Historic period, between 1400 to 1500 A.D. This particular object was excavated near Millstone, CT in 1959 and was most likely manufactured by the Nehantic or Niantic Indians. Ceramic vessels of this type were generally made out of a mixture of clay, wood ashes, and pulverized shells. This wet clay mixture was then used to line a woven basket that was dried, placed into a fire, and baked in the sun. The basket part of the vessel burned off in the fire, leaving the ceramic pot imprinted with the criss-cross design of the basket. While it is unknown exactly what kind of food was prepared in this particular cooking vessel, Native American diets consisted primarily of maize, squash, and beans. While this cooking vessel has seen better days, it is indicative of the staple foods that constituted indigenous diets and the craftsmanship of the indigenous tribes that created ceramics.

Rabbit Stick

This wooden throwing stick was used by Native American tribes to hunt rabbits, squirrels, prairie dogs, fowl, and other game. This particular object is part of the Melville Collection, collected from the Hopi Mesas in Arizona. On a road trip across the country, the Melville family became acquainted with the local Hopi population and collected objects they believed provided insight and understanding to the Hopi culture. Along with plants that constituted a large part of indigenous diets, meat was also an important part of sustenance. The red and black design on this particular throwing stick represented a rabbit’s feet. This object is significant because it provides insight into Native American spirituality that respected animals and believed in asking permission to take the spirit of an animal before hunting. Additionally, hunting allowed members of the community to hunt together for the needs of the community as a whole. I don’t know about you, but I can hardly imagine the skill required to hunt with such an object!

It’s amazing how much one object can tell us about the different histories, cultures, and practices of people around the world! The objects in this blog post are among some of the food-related artifacts that are housed at the Wesleyan Archaeology and Anthropology Collections. We hope that they provided a glimpse into the past (and perhaps will spark a conversation at your next holiday gathering)!

…and stay tuned for Part II that will focus on actual “food” from the collections!

Further Reading:

Archaeology of Food: An Encyclopedia edited by Karen Bescherer Metheny & Mary C. Beaudry (2015)

Daily Life of Native Americans from Post-Columbian through Nineteenth-century America by Alice N. Nash & Christopher Strobel (2006)

Hopis, Tewas, and the American Road edited by Willard Walker & Lydia L. Wyckoff (1983)

The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage by Rachel Laudan (1996)

Posted by Steven Chen ’18

Preserving Middletown: One artifact at a time

October 26, 2016 by student

In the years between 1974 and 1985, Professor Stephen Dyson of the Wesleyan University Classics Department led his Introduction to Archaeology classes in the excavation of upwards of 11 sites around Middletown. Most of these sites corresponded with properties in the region between Main Street and the Connecticut River; during the late 18^th century, this area was chiefly inhabited by families associated with Middletown’s short-lived but very successful shipping industry.

**A historic map reproduction of Middletown, CT, published by Hughes and Bailey in 1915**

Professor Dyson’s excavations were often conducted under severe time constraints. As he discusses in his articles on the subject, Dyson’s primary goal was to preserve the historical integrity of these sites as the structural integrity became increasingly compromised. Beginning with the construction of Route 9 across the river and culminating in an enthusiastic urban renewal effort in the 70s, buildings that had been left relatively untouched for decades were in danger of being torn down and forgotten. With the help of his students, and occasionally mere days before the scheduled destruction of the buildings, Professor Dyson collected and analyzed the remnants of the lives of Middletown’s historical families—paying particular attention to ceramic artifacts—in an effort to reconstruct and tell their stories.

Dyson stored his finds in Wesleyan’s Archaeology and Anthropology Collections and published two articles on his excavations; several of his students contributed papers on the subject as well. After finishing out his work at the university, however, Dyson’s finds lost their immediate relevance and were relegated to a place of honor in the Exley Penthouse—if by “Penthouse,” one means the chaotic storage facility on the seventh floor of the Exley Science Center, and by “place of honor,” one means dilapidated plastic bags crammed into chests of drawers, shoved in a corner, and forgotten.

Archaeology and Anthropology Collections storage location in the Exley penthouse

And so, from a certain perspective, Professor Dyson’s worst nightmare came to pass: the artifacts lost both their historical integrity and, perhaps more importantly, their historical context. Beyond the limited information gleaned from non-standardized tags and labels in the artifact bags, it is extremely difficult to determine anything definitive about these finds, or the people whose lives they represent. And this story is not unique to Professor Dyson’s efforts; errors of judgment and disregard occur frequently in the business of artifact preservation, often resulting in the irretrievable loss of information pertaining to the finds. And just how useful can these objects be without their context?

In Wesleyan’s Archaeology and Anthropology Collections, we are going to try to find out, because the story of Professor Dyson’s excavations does not end here. Beginning in the summer of 2015 and due to a reorganization of the Collections’ space in the Exley Science Center, Wesleyan students such as myself have been slowly and methodically going through the finds from Dyson’s excavations, reorganizing and cataloging them so as to be compatible with our current archiving system.

I joined the effort relatively late in the game, and I can’t begin to imagine how overwhelming this undertaking must have seemed at the outset. The process is relatively straightforward: Dyson’s finds are stored in plastic bags and housed in trays or boxes in the Collections’ storage spaces on the third and seventh floors of the Exley Science Center. Our job is to go through each bag individually, sort out particularly interesting (or particularly rusty) materials, repackage the finds in new bags, use the information on Dyson’s students’ tags to label the new bags coherently and consistently, then store the new bags in standardized boxes. By the end of the ordeal, all of Dyson’s finds will be housed in neatly labeled white boxes and recorded in our computer system in a standardized form.

Working on this project has been my first exposure both to Wesleyan’s collections, as well as to the fields of archaeology and artifact preservation in general. It has been an incredibly interesting experience because the artifacts that I work with every day have been, in a sense, doubly lost. As I spread them out in front of me, it is as if I am looking at them through two distorted lenses; the first is the lens through which Dyson and his students initially analyzed the objects upon their recovery from the sites, but the second is the result of years of neglect and gathering dust in the attic. It is difficult enough to reconstruct a story through that first lens; the second makes it nearly impossible.

Our efforts have not been entirely without success, however. Professor Dyson and his students provided some information on the families who lived on the properties, which, along with historical background on Middletown, has made it possible to make certain inferences regarding some objects—in other words, it makes for an entertaining guessing game. Dyson already noted in his articles that some of the families showed a preference for certain colors and types of ceramic-ware over others—plates with blue decorations versus plates with green decorations, as well as the somewhat rarer occurrence of “mocha-ware.”

Top shelf: Glassware salvaged in front of Wesleyan's Center for African American Studies in spring of 1990 Bottom shelf: Partially reconstructed ceramic material from various archaeological sites along Middletown's Main Street Historic District — **Top shelf:** Glassware salvaged in front of Wesleyan’s Center for African American Studies in spring of 1990
**Bottom shelf:** Partially reconstructed ceramic material from various archaeological sites along Middletown’s Main Street Historic District

It is also the case that some types of artifacts will always tell a clearer story than others. For example, an artifact bag containing no fewer than four multicolored marbles is pretty strong evidence of the remnants of a child’s old game. The same can be said for the beautiful bone die that I found in a different bag from the same site. Both the marbles and the die look as if they could have come out of a game box purchased yesterday.

A sample of the marbles salvaged from the Danforth Site during Professor Dyson's excavations — A sample of the marbles salvaged from the Danforth Site during Professor Dyson’s excavations

Bone die salvaged from Danforth Site by Professor Dyson

Finds like the marbles, which paint such a clear picture of life in these houses over two centuries ago, tend to make the “interesting finds” cut and are moved to individually labeled bags in a special box for display and further examination. However, not all of the artifacts in the “interesting finds” box have such simple explanations. Some of my favorite finds are the ones that I instinctively believe to have had value, but offer no obvious explanation for their use.

One such artifact, which I find particularly interesting, is a circular object, about one centimeter in diameter, which has been carved in the shape of an owl’s head.

Owl-shaped artifact salvaged from the mysterious "E" site by Professor Dyson — Owl-shaped artifact salvaged from the mysterious “E” site by Professor Dyson

We initially believed this object to be a button, but the eyes of the owl don’t pierce all the way through from the obverse to the reverse side, and there is therefore no place to attached thread. It could be a pendant of some sort but, again, there is no visible place to attach a chain or string. We aren’t even sure what material the object is made of, but my own examination under a microscope as led me to believe it is made of some kind of stone. The only thing I can really say about this object with certainty is that I find it beautiful, which is nothing more than a subjective observation.

Another case of an interesting object with no obvious use is the mystery squares.

The "mystery squares" found by Professor Dyson and his students at both the Hall and Sumner St. sites. — The “mystery squares” found by Professor Dyson and his students at both the Hall and Sumner St. sites.

At least five of these have been found in the bags from two different sites. Each is about one square inch and each is stamped with the letter “B”. We have absolutely no idea what their use could have been, but they keep popping up so they must have been important. Right?

Working on Dyson’s collection has given me a unique perspective on the work of artifact preservation because it has forced me to ask myself repeatedly what “preservation” really means. We are certainly working hard to preserve the actual, physical objects; we are placing them in sturdier containers, separating out any metal objects whose rustiness might harm the other artifacts in the bags, removing anything fragile enough to require its own, separate container, and (my personal favorite) getting rid of any mold in the old bags.

But preserving an object—preserving anything, really—is just as much about preserving its soul as its body, and it remains unclear to me how successful we have been in that endeavor. It makes me wonder what future archaeologists will think when they discover modern archaeological collections such as the one located in Exley 301. How salvageable is the new context we have given to these artifacts? Will it be obvious that the proximity of these objects to one another is contrived, or will future archaeologists come up with some fantastical explanation for how ancient stone tools from a cave in Israel-Palestine, a motley assortment of animal bones from all over the world, and partially-reconstructed ceramic plates from Middletown, Connecticut all ended up in the same room?

Some of the story will always be irretrievable, and it can be difficult to accept that. But I’d like to think that the attention we have devoted to these objects, the time we have spent wiping pounds and pounds of dust off of glass shards, and the laughs we have shared while speculating on the history of these artifacts have imbued them with a second life, of sorts. Or maybe it’s a third.

Additional Information:

“Middletown Site Summaries” compiled by Thea De Armond

“Material Culture, Social Structure, and Changing Cultural Values: The Ceramics of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Middletown, Connecticut” by Stephen L. Dyson, in Archaeology of Urban America: The Search for Pattern and Process

“Historical Archaeology in Middletown, Connecticut” by Stephen L. Dyson

“The Relationship Between Social History and Historical Archaeology: The Mercantile Community of Middletown, Connecticut” by Brenda Ellen Gray

Posted by Sophia Shoulson ’18

The Long-Lasting Legacy of Wesleyan’s Professor Van Benschoten

August 16, 2016 by student

Professor James Cooke Van Benschoten, affectionately known as Van Benny to his students, taught Greek at Wesleyan from 1863 until his death in 1902. His story seems to parallel that of other professors, historians, and artifact enthusiasts of the 19th century. Rules and laws regarding what could be collected and from where did not yet exist, or at least were not strongly enforced. As such, historians collected and moved artifacts from place to place in an almost Indiana Jones-like manner: provenance and provenience were less important than the object itself. These objects, however, continue to have an important place in university and museum collections. They tell the story of historical collecting trends and preservation methods.

Born in 1827 to a farming family in La Grange, Illinois, it was expected that eldest child James would follow in the footsteps of his father. After the family relocated to upstate New York, James confessed that he wanted to become a scholar. James worked his way through school, serving as a doctor’s assistant, tutor, and teacher. He attended Genesee College, obtained a bachelor’s degree from Hamilton College, and a master’s degree in 1857 from Madison – now Colgate – University. Following graduation, James traveled around Europe, furthering his studies in several universities, and focusing his visits on Greece and Asia Minor. James spent time in the Mount Athos region of Greece, where he lived amongst the monks reviewing their extensive manuscript libraries.

Monastery of Megisti Lavra, the oldest monastery on Mount Athos. Photo taken late 19th century - early 20th century. — Monastery of Megisti Lavra, the oldest monastery on Mount Athos. Photo taken late 19th century – early 20th century.

Upon returning to upstate New York, James became a high school principal and then a teacher of ancient languages at a nearby seminary. In 1863 James began teaching Greek at Wesleyan. It is said that “Professor Van Benschoten at once aroused a genuine enthusiasm in his classes.” While at Wesleyan, James continued to travel, incorporating his learnings from Europe and elsewhere into his lectures and teachings. And so began his decades-long collecting of various ancient relics, many of which would later be donated by James and his descendants to Wesleyan. (For more historical information on the Van Benschoten family see: Concerning the Van Bunschoten or Van Benschoten Family in America, A Genealogy and Brief History, by William Henry Van Benschoten, 1907.)

Among the many honors, fellowships, and additional titles bestowed upon James, he served as Director of the American School of Archaeology in Athens from 1884-85. During his time there, he collected many objects that he brought back to Wesleyan. One of his most famed acquisitions was a mummy. After targeted unwrapping to ensure that he wasn’t being conned into buying a mummy made of trash or another animal (which was not unusual at the time, see: here and here), James began to try to transport the mummy back to Wesleyan. During this time the authorities were trying to stop the flow of antiquities out of the Near East and they insisted that James have an exit permit for the mummy. He worked his way around to multiple offices having no luck. James was told that “greasing the palms” of government employees might help. Eventually he was tipped off that he might be able to get the mummy out of the country on a British warship. The trail goes cold here, and it’s not entirely clear how the mummy made it back to Wesleyan, though James was somehow successful in his quest. For a time the mummy was either on display or at least available for minimal viewing within the walls of the Wesleyan Museum (1871-1957). (Research conducted in the 1970s showed that the mummy was definitely a human male, 5’2”, between 20 and 25 years of age, and of middle- to upper-class means. Based on analyses, the mummy has been dated to somewhere within the 7^th and 4^th centuries BC. Currently, the mummy is stored in a secured location and all measures are taken to preserve the culturally sensitive nature of the individual.)

In addition to the now infamous mummy, James Cooke Van Benschoten collected and donated additional artifacts that remain within the Wesleyan University Archaeology and Anthropology Collections. James had daughters, at least one of whom graduated from Wesleyan near the turn of the twentieth century. Descendants of James’ donated even more artifacts in 2005. Included in this donation were a Chinese chest and various smaller artifacts, such as bronze figurines, coins, scarabs, and faience fragments.

Chinese Qing dynasty red-lacquered trunk (object ID: 2005.5.1) and various figurines, scarabs, and pottery. All collected by James Cooke Van Benschoten in the mid- to late-19th century; donated by his descendants in 2005.

Object ID 1902.722.8: Roman-style oil lamp produced between the 1st and 5th centuries; collected in Greece circa 1860-61 by Professor James Cooke Van Benschoten and donated in 1902 by Mrs. Van Benschoten.

Object IDs (left to right) 1902.722.18: pottery sherd with handle attached; 2005.5.47: reconstructed lekythos vessel (circa 4th century BC); 2005.5.42: terracotta bust painted to look like patinaed bronze; 1902.722.4: reconstructed lekythos vessel. All objects were collected in Greece or other unknown parts of Europe in the mid- to late-1800s by Professor James Cooke Van Benschoten. All objects were donated by relatives of Professor Van Benschoten.

The legacy of James Cooke Van Benschoten continues on today throughout campus. In fact, Van Benschoten’s name has made Wesleyan and Connecticut state-wide news in the last several years: the 2010 naming of the Wesleyan baseball field as “Dresser Diamond,” in honor of Jim Dresser, ’63, P’93, and former Cardinal, comes nearly 150 years after Dresser’s great-grandfather – none other than James Cooke Van Benschoten – named the original Wesleyan baseball team “the Agallians.” See this News @ Wesleyan article and this Special Collections and Archives finding aid for more history on the Agallians. In 2015, this legacy was touched upon again when Wesleyan and Yale celebrated the 150th anniversary of their baseball programs as well as the initial meeting of the two teams. The Yale Nine beat the Wesleyan Agallian Club September 30, 1865 in what is considered to be the very first collegiate baseball game. On September 26, 2015, the two teams faced off in a celebratory exhibition game – in which Dresser threw the first pitch … Wesleyan won.

Professor Van Benschoten’s legacy also survives through the gift of his many donated relics and artifacts collected throughout the world. Students, professors, and researchers alike can view these materials in the Archaeology and Anthropology Collection.

As for the Wesleyan mummy … we’re going to continue to keep him under wraps!