The best piece of ivory ever

During the past couple of days our anthropology class has been excavating a site in the remains of old Nash Harbor village. This village hasn’t been inhabited for about fifty years. One of the people that used to live here is our camp elder, Nan. Nan has been spending time here in Nash Harbor telling us stories. She has lots of great stories. So far it has been a lot of fun. My main job at our dig site is screening. Screening is where you sift dirt removed from the site in order to find the artifacts. I really like doing that because I get to find all of the best artifacts, in my opinion. In my dig site I found a piece of ivory that had been sawed down. It could have been sawed down to make a piece of artwork for trading, because the people that used to live here did a lot of trading for other goods. The piece of ivory was in the dig site perhaps because it was unusable. It was most likely the core of an old walrus tusk. The fact that we found ivory shows that the people that used to live here used traditional methods of ivory carving all the way into the 20th century. Europeans didn’t have a presence at Nash Harbor until the 1920’s.

As you can see in the picture above the ivory that I found is no longer white because it has been in the ground for so long. It was about four inches long and an inch thick. It was super pretty even though it was dirty. I scrubbed it with a toothbrush but it is still brown. I used my lip gloss as a size comparison because it was the only thing that I had at the time, and I love my lip gloss.

♥

Jenny

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 30th, 2007 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Summer Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.