Hello everyone. It’s been a while since I last posted here. However that does not mean I haven’t been writing. I have. Just to a different audience – my archeological colleagues. And when I tell you that I’ve been writing about how deep objects sink when stepped on, and what that means for the archeological record, I can already hear the sighs of relief. ‘Sure glad he didn’t share that gem with us.’
For me it doesn’t get much more exciting than that. At least during these Covid times when repeatedly stepping on marbles was the highlight of my day. In fact, when I carried out some of these experiments along the banks of the North Saskatchewan River near Devon, Alberta, this summer they drew a lot attention. As in, ‘What’s that weirdo doing?‘ People were obviously bored.
After explaining to one mother and her ten year old daughter, why I was stomping on marbles in a sandbox, the mom quickly whisked her daughter away, looking over her shoulder to make sure I wasn’t following. I guess I left quite an impression. That young girl will now have forever an image in her head of what an archaeologist looks like and does for a living. And it won’t be the Indiana Jones kind, but some old guy, with long white hair tied in a pony tail, trampling on marbles, then carefully recording those results. And that poor mother’s ‘Indi’ dream archaeologist was forever shattered as well.
There are times however when my profession is a little more exciting and the things we find are jaw droppers. One-of-a-kinds, such as this bone/ivory artifact found at the Fort Vermilion I (c.1798 – 1830) fur trade post in northern Alberta. We think it’s a toothbrush, perhaps one of the earliest ever to enter the province. This perfectly preserved object, with some of the bristles still intact at both ends, currently is the only one found in Alberta and I have only seen a fragment of one like it found at a NWT fort.
So what is an object like this doing at a frontier wilderness post in what was then the middle of nowhere (and in some respects still is)? My colleagues and I have been asking ourselves that question for some time now. Aside from idle speculation, we have few definitive answers. Dental hygiene was not at a very advanced stage at the turn of the 19th century anywhere in the world, let alone some Canadian frontier trading post. Especially among the lower income fort laborer’s.
Although the toothbrush was already invented in China sometime in the 7th – 8th century A. D. by the Dang Dynasty, it took a while for Europe to catch on.
Here’s what the toothbrush history experts have to say on the subject:
“At around 1780, the first toothbrush was made by William Addis of Clerkenald, England. Addis, and later, his descendants, manufactured the finest English brushes, where the handles were carved out of the bone of cattle and the heads of the natural bristles were placed in the bored holes made in the bone and kept in place by thin wire. The natural bristles were obtained from the necks and shoulders of swine, especially from pigs living in colder climates like Siberia and China.
By the early 1800s the bristled brushes were in general use in Europe and Japan. In 1857, H. N. Wadsworth was credited as the first American to receive a toothbrush patent as America entered the growing toothbrush market.” (https://mrs-o-c.com/computers/history/toothbrush/toothbrushHistory.htm
Here is sort of a similar-looking bone toothbrush from 1844:
It’s not as if this was a common artifact in western Canada. No. It was essentially a ‘one-off.’ And how did this rather pristine, still functional object end up in the fort midden pile? We can only speculate, but it seems reasonable to assume it belonged to a person who did not linger long at this ‘silvan abode in the woods.’ (A tongue-in-cheek quote from Alexander Ross, 1825, describing the rather decrepit looking Fort Assiniboine, Alberta) Or we would have found more like it.
Let me assure you this find is unusual and not normal fur trade archaeology. But then trampling on marbles isn’t either. Both however do make for a good story. In my next post I’ll speculate even more about this object with a short story of historical fiction. I wish I could share this post with that mother and child to help restore their image of archaeology. Too late for that though.
Until then, stay safe everyone.
In the meantime, in order to fight Covid, I’m going to brush my teeth with the new toothpaste I just acquired. If they had this toothpaste in the fur trade, we would have found a lot more toothbrushes:
