In my last post you may have noticed a picture of a small orange bead. The bead is similar to trade beads found at Fort Vancouver. Trade beads were used as currency during the Hudson’s Bay Company era by Native Americans and fur traders who exchanged the beads with each other for various goods. The beads were made of glass and came in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors.
On its own this tiny orange bead could potentially be interpreted as a Hudson’s Bay Company-era trade bead. Do I think it is a trade bead? No, I do not, and the reason is context. I found this bead at one of the homes where I was digging recently for the first fort project. The bead was in the top 20 centimeters of a shovel probe (a shovel probe is hole with a relatively narrow diameter dug by an archaeologist).
In that same level I found artifacts from the 20th century: a broken rusted butter knife, 3 wire nails, chunks of concrete, and other items. I could tell that the soil in this level was disturbed, meaning the sediments were not in their original depositional positions. I know from my ethnographic study that this property has seen intensive gardening activities for decades, so the soils at this depth have likely been turned over many times. In the level below at 20-30 cm below the surface I found more modern items like a metal clothes pin spring, charcoal, and some melted black plastic. Even deeper at 30-40 cm below the surface I found more wire nails, and below that no artifacts whatsoever. There is still the possibility that the orange bead was a trade bead and had been transported to this spot in fill from somewhere else. However since the same type of bead is still manufactured today, it was found with a mixture of 20th-century artifacts, the soil was disturbed, and it was found near the ground surface (read about stratigraphy in my post titled What Do Archaeologists Do: Part 2) the most likely conclusion is that it is a modern bead deposited in this spot around the same time as the other artifacts. The melted plastic and the presence of charcoal may suggest that these items were part of burn pit. But without gathering more clues in further excavation units, it is hard to say.
Artifacts on their own can be extremely fascinating. Many people enjoy collecting historic bottles, cannonballs, even barbed wire. There are things to be learned about the past simply by studying individual artifacts. But one thing that distinguishes archaeologists from collectors is that archaeologists strive to use artifacts along with all the other things that make up an archaeological site (a suite of artifacts, the sediments, features, etc.) to discover information about the big picture of a site. Picking up an historic bottle in the forest might seem fun. However, once that bottle is separated from the context of the site it becomes much less able to help us learn about the past. Archaeologists want to know about the overall history of a site: who was there, why were they there, what activities they were doing there.
This is why context is so important. Context is everything from a site put together to gain knowledge about the past. For example, if someone picked up the tiny orange bead somewhere, brought it to me, and asked what time period it was from, I could not interpret much about it since beads like this have been manufactured over a long period of time. However, since I excavated it archaeologically I can determine from the context I described above that it is likely from a recent time period. If I had found it 50 cm below the surface in the same level as clay pipe stems and transferprint ceramics in undisturbed sediments I would likely be able to interpret it as a Hudson’s Bay Company trade bead. So as you can see, it is not the bead itself, but the context in which the bead is found that helps us figure out what happened in the past.
Artifacts are fabulous, but context is everything. When we lose context through looting of artifacts and destruction of sites we lose knowledge about the past. Archaeological sites are non-renewable resources, and once a site is destroyed all of the information that could be gleaned from it is gone forever. That is why it is so important to excavate archaeological sites scientifically, judiciously, and using appropriate documentation methods for the benefit of everyone.