Button up!

Buttons are one of the most intimate items we find in excavations. While they are certainly a functional part of dress, they are also an outward expression of the identity of their wearer. Modes of bodily adornment express individual style, but can also signify belonging to a community or group.

Bone Brass Shell

Archaeologists Geoffrey and Francoise Summers found button making waste on excavations on Ile de la Passe. While we didn’t recover any button-making materials in Bras d’Eau, the Summers’ discovery suggests that bone buttons in Bras d’Eau were likely made by hand in Mauritius.

We also found 15 buttons from British military-issued uniforms with a crown and regiment number in the center. According to Mauritian cultural historian Amenah Jahangeer-Chojoo (personal communication), indentured laborers sometimes purchased second-hand uniforms because they were warm and well-tailored. One could also run a small business gathering up and re-selling these outfits. I still need to track down the regiment numbers on these buttons to see whether these regiments passed through Mauritius or whether the clothing was shipped in from elsewhere. My preliminary searches showed that these regiments were based around the Indian Ocean.

Anthropologists have looked critically at the intersection of globalization and second-hand clothing in non-western societies (Hansen 2000; Na’amneh and Husban 2012; Appelgren and Bohlin 2015) and in doing so are moving away from older anthropological models that identified such societies “cargo cults.”

We might see these buttons as representing the beginning of this global trend of shipping second-hand clothing to the global south.

Other clothing included D-ring belt buckles, fasteners, and jewelry, including a cuprous ring and some very small fragments of a red and black glass bangle.

For more check out Dr. Diana Dipaolo Loren’s 2011 book, The Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment in Colonial America!

And this 1994 thesis on the manufacture and chronology of buttons from a student at the University of Tennessee, Sarah Elizabeth Marcel.

Citations:

Appelgren, Staffan & Anna Bohlin: “Growing in Motion” Culture Unbound, Volume 7, 2015: 143-168.

Hansen, Karen Tranberg. Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

M.M. Na’amneh & A.K. Al Husban. “Identity in old clothes: the socio-cultural dynamics of second-hand clothing in Irbid, Jordan,” Social Identities, 18:5, 2012: 609-621. DOI: 10.1080/13504630.2012.692897

Tantalizing Glass

The majority of glass artifacts we recovered from Bras d’Eau are olive green bottle glass shards. These bottles typically were thought to hold alcohol, but they also could have been reused to carry water or other liquids. A much smaller selection of artifacts have “maker’s marks” or labels that are molded or embossed into the glass, often on a boss on the body or on the base of the vessel. These marks seem to promise to reveal so much about the vessel and what it might have contained, but unfortunately the text or symbols are almost always partial and therefore are difficult to track down. While I haven’t been able to discover much about this subset of the glass assemblage, it is interesting to note that almost all are in French…

• 

  “K.D. PINAUD”

• 

  “AU, NANTES”
  

• 

  “GOURDIN FRES BORDEAUX/ COGNAC CHAMPAGNE/1795”
  

• 

  ” OL / CO “

Play my videogame: “Journey of an Indentured Laborer”

Walking from the village to the cane fields. Journey of an Indentured Laborer

I’ve created a video game called ‘Journey of an Indentured Laborer’ based on the archaeology at Bras d’Eau! The game is intended to show what the laborers’ village might looked like from the perspective of an indentured worker. The layout of the housing is based on ruins we surveyed and mapped inside Bras d’Eau. All the items and sprites you encounter during the game are a sample of the of real artifacts we uncovered during excavations. Watch out for some hidden health hazards!

I found out about this amazingly user-friendly game maker called Bitsy, created by Adam Le Doux, during a videogame-making workshop hosted by the Scholars Lab at UVa.  Anyone can make a game and publish it for free online by creating a free itch.io account.

I update, edit and expand the game every few months when I have time often, so check back soon to see what new objects or areas of the plantation you can explore.

Please play and let me know what you think!

Porcelain?

 

 

Archaeologists create typologies, essentially a categorization system, to distinguish between different kinds of pottery base on where they were produced, the type of clay, glaze or decoration applied to the surface, the shape of the vessel or object, and how they were fired. Typologies of non-western produced ceramics for the historic period (end of the 18th through 19th century for Bras d’Eau) are not well established, so determining what these sherds are, who made or used them, and where they came from has been challenging.

Public Open Days in Bras d’Eau

Sourcing Bricks…

Just found this posting from Brickfrog about Cowen bricks!

Stone, Bricks, Mortar and Tiles: Architectural Archaeological Artifacts

While mapping a new area of Bras d’Eau last week we found some new bricks with maker’s marks on them.

Architectural Archaeological artifacts (as opposed to stains in the dirt-old vestiges of post-molds) offer a glimpse not only into architectural styles and building strategies of the past, but tells us about growing networks of trade and exchange. The choice to import heavy bricks into Mauritius by ship from afar rather than making use of local building materials, such as the plentiful basalt found all over the volcanic island, represents the beginning of use of foreign material goods.

On the other hand, this nicely cut local stone with a “IV” mark, was removed from the area next to the sugar mill when the foundations for the new shade house and water tank were being put in.

Cut stone like this are being stolen from old ruins all over Mauritius in a sort of “second harvest.”
More on preservation, conservation, destruction and heritage management later.
Merci pour les photos, Cathy!

L’Express Newspaper Article

First public archaeology tour of Bras d’Eau with the Teachers Club North!

July survey with MACH and students from the University of Mauritius and Stanford University

We started with pedestrian survey of a new area. We mapped and documented features (all stone walls or platforms) first with a compass, meter tape and ipad.

Next we mapped in the features with my new Leica total station. Merci au Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia!

Lastly, we set up a grid with the total station and collected all artifacts from the surface and dug some shovel test pits (STPs) to find subsurface deposits.

Merci beaucoup à Shamia Fokeerbux, Nishant Ramdhun, Yoshita Pokhun, Akischa Seasagar, Swishti Beerjou, Keshni Devi Chikhooreeah, ek Yutian Qu pou zot couraz ek zot zeffor!!!