Finding Treasure Amid Yesteryear’s Trash

Two grad students bring new enthusiasm to studying artifacts

by MIKAYLA RODERICK and EMILY WILLIS Historical Archaeology Program University of Massachusetts Boston

Editor’s note: In 1978, Historic New England commissioned an archaeological team to conduct a dig at CooperFrost-Austin House in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The dig uncovered a number of artifacts at the 1681 property, which recent dendrochronology testing has documented as the oldest dwelling standing in Cambridge. More than four decades after the dig, two archaeology master’s degree students from UMass Boston are taking a fresh look at the artifacts using updated methodologies to reassess the finds.

» EMILY

It was a crisp early-November day, annus Coronaviri. Masked, hands sanitized, armed with a piqued curiosity and a duty to protect and discover, I walked into the lab— large, iced Americano with a double shot of espresso in hand. I greeted the twenty-six bankers boxes in the darkness of the “Classroom” before I flipped the lights on, “Bonjour mes amis, j’espère que vous-avez passés un bon weekend” (I always speak to them in French). I set about my work, picking out individual bags, themselves forty-two years old, containing treasures of a longforgotten corner of the nineteenth century. As I worked through the glass assemblage, I lifted out the most beautiful cranberry glass pedestalled dish, gold leaf filigree wrapping delicately around its curvatures. “Mikayla!” I shouted to my friend as she walked in the door. “You have to see this!” » MIKAYLA

I, however, had arrived late to the party. Having heard Emily speak to the beauty that the collection held, I was more than intrigued. I heard shouting down the hallway and burst into the room looking to throw hands. To my surprise, everything was fine; just Emily dancing about with an artifact sitting on the table before her. » EMILY

“Mikayla! Mikayla! Look at this! I’ve never seen anything like this before. This is a ring dish. This has to be a ring dish. It’s beautiful! And look! Look! Lenses!” I picked up another bag that held seven separated lenses from what I could swear were pince-nez glasses and put them right under Mikayla’s nose, glee bursting from the upper half of my masked face. » MIKAYLA

“You know where we have to go? To the site report!” Grabbing the old and beaten-up report of the “Seventeenth Century Historical Archaeology in Cambridge, Medford, and Dorchester” by David Starbuck, I began flipping through it. We set forth on our journey back in time. » EMILY

We poured over the pages, eager to find any and all leads on what this all was, and more importantly, whose it was. I looked back and forth between my cranberry ring dish, the site report, and Mikayla. “This doesn’t look like it’s from the seventeenth century. I mean. . . . Maybe the lenses if they were monocles? But? I just... they don’t feel seventeenth century to me.” » MIKAYLA

“Oh look! Right here, in the Excavation section [of the site report] they talk about how back in 1978 the crew was tasked with looking for material from the seventeenth century, but at Cooper-Frost-Austin they barely found any, it was mostly nineteenth century.” Flipping through the report again, I said, “But they don’t really talk about it, at least not in detail. How strange!” » EMILY

“I guess they focused on what they could from the seventeenth century; the stuff here wouldn’t fit with their research goals or interpretations. Wasn’t this group of excavations done as part of a larger project to map seventeenth-century sites around Boston? It feels like

they set the nineteenth-century assemblages aside and never came back to them. If I could I’d send Starbuck some flowers with a card that says, ‘Thank you sir, we’ll take it from here.’ Here, let’s look at the family history Starbuck et al., set out for Cooper-Frost-Austin and see who was in the house at the time.”

I scanned through the section in question, muttering about 250 years of family continuity, Cooper to Cooper, then Cooper to Frost, within the Frosts, and then from the Frosts to the Austins, a closely knit kinship web, marriage and death as the knots (quite impressed), and then paused. Hunched together, Mikayla and I read that for nearly the entirety of the 1800s, the house was owned by one Susan Screech Austin—a woman in her own right rather than by marriage. I looked up at Mikayla and chuckled; we love a unique, strong woman.

Susan had married the Reverend Reuben Seiders, a minister in the Unitarian Protestant Church of Cambridge, who changed his name and took hers to become Richard Thomas Austin. “I bet all of this was theirs. Susan was born in 1808, the house went to her after her father died, and when Richard Thomas died in 1849, Susan lived on in the house until her death in 1885. Yeah ... the nineteenth-century artifacts would make sense as belonging to them. The only other person who lived with them at Cooper-FrostAustin during this time was Susan’s mother. Also, have you noticed that all of these incredible, nearly intact artifacts have come from maybe one or two units?” » MIKAYLA

“Okay, where is the section that talks about these units?” After some searching, we came across a very specific event that seemed to be one whole house cleaning deposited in a small space within the garage, fondly known as the “garage test pit.” This pit was filled to the brim with an assortment of ceramics, glass, metal, and just about anything else you could think of. Taking a step back, we gently riffled through the boxes once more, pulling semi-intact Gothic teacups and plates made of porcelain, glittering bottles of amethyst and olive green, myriad glass goblets and fine tableware, an adorable dog figurine, and a Parisian ceramic toothpaste box. » EMILY

We sat down to get back to work. Archaeology is very much a physical job. The field demands endurance, dexterity, commitment, an apathy for sweating, and teamwork. As exciting and wondrous as it is to shave centimeters away from artifacts seeing the light of day for the first time in decades/ centuries/millennia, the majority of archaeology is not done in field; it is done in the laboratory (our “Classroom” at the University of Massachusetts Boston in this instance). The lab is where the magic happens—and boy, did it! Our job currently is to take an inventory of the contents of the twenty-six bankers boxes that contain the thousands of artifacts recovered from the Cooper-Frost-Austin House. These boxes contain artifacts spanning the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. As we inventory the artifacts, we also take careful notes of the condition of each piece, repackaging them in more protective and appropriate artifact bags, always making sure to write the contextspecific information of each item on each bag and identification tag.

At times it is slow work, but those times are some of the most exciting; holding 200-year-old things in your hands, time travel... suddenly the mind gets lost in all the possibilities associated with this one object— the uses, meanings, the everyday seemingly inconsequential decisions that went into this one piece finding its way into the Austin household, into the ground, and now in our hands. » MIKAYLA

As much as the care and curation of these artifacts are taken into consideration, so too are the deeper meanings that are placed on them. As we go about this extensive cataloguing project, we are jotting down what these things could have meant for those who once used them every day. The items are an ephemeral bridge to the past, connecting material culture to the nonmaterial. Nonmaterial culture is what we know as aspects of identity, such as gender, sexuality, race, and class and where they fuse together, where they ebb and flow. The way one carries one’s self in the world is shaped by the intersections of identity; a Black, heterosexual, cisgender tradesman in the nineteenth century would have lived quite a different life from an upper-middleclass white English Protestant cisgender woman of the same time period. It is also very important to always be aware that the artifacts you handle are representations of their time, and as such, are representations of the cultural norms of their time.

Consider the Parisian toothpaste box, for instance. Not only does it speak to health and hygiene of the time, it also articulates the levels of cross-cultural connections. Being an imported good, the implications of finding its way from the creation of French craftspeople to the producers of the toothpaste within it, across the sea to the shores of Massachusetts,

PAGE 10 Emily Willis peers at the cranberry glass pedestalled dish she found among the artifacts stored from a 1978 archaeological dig at Cooper-Frost-Austin House in Cambridge, Massachusetts. LEFT This Parisian toothpaste case was among the discarded items found during the dig. BELOW Emily Willis (left) and Mikayla Broderick show their excitement in the UMass Boston “Classroom” where they are cataloguing and researching the artifacts.

where it would later be purchased and used daily. In essence, this item does more than what is intended of it; because it was imported, it is expected that it was a more expensive item and therefore available for those who could afford it. This factors in the economic and class status of those who used it. » EMILY

Mikayla and I still have quite a bit of work to do with the collection: cataloguing, cleaning, sorting, and then analysis. The Cooper-Frost-Austin House collection is so extensive and rich that upwards of twelve possible master’s theses can be written using it alone. Mikayla and I represent two of those thesis writers. This autumn we will begin analyzing the assemblages specific to our individual research. Part of the analysis phase is identifying what the objects are, when they are from, and to whom they belonged. We have a general idea of when most of the collection was made, when it was deposited (thrown out), and who owned or used the items; but we want as much accuracy as possible.

To make identifications, archaeologists can draw on several different kinds of sources. Primary sources are ideal when they are available and legible. Among these are personal correspondence, newspapers, tombstones, books, pamphlets, diaries, maps, probate records, and art. Primary sources are also artifacts themselves, and as such, archaeologists must analyze them critically, as everything that is created is a product of its time and its culture and therefore has its own meanings and biases. Secondary sources also help archaeologists; these include journal articles, studies, books, site reports, and research that has been conducted on the same or similar/intersecting topics and time periods, which can be used to inform archaeological interpretations. They may come from fellow archaeologists or scholars in other disciplines, such as art historians, ecologists, or theologists.

There are also reference collections for ceramics that are often a huge help in identifying and discovering the monetary associations of the goods. Ideally, archaeologists use multiple lines of evidence that they tack between, tying primary sources to reference collections to secondary sources back to primary sources back to the artifact itself (or any combination of tacking). The goal is to build a substantial foundation of evidence from these different lines of information to correctly identify the artifact and its owner. Then, one is able to explore its complexity in depth.

Since that November day in 2020, the CooperFrost-Austin House collection has been a never-ending adventure. Anyone who might have walked past the door to the Classroom would have seen the two of us running laps around the tables, screaming with excitement, hands flailing above our heads. Each day is new, each bag is a mystery, and each box brings us closer to knowing Susan Austin and her husband — their lives, their beliefs, their joys and sorrows. One woman’s trash is at least two women’s treasure.