Oh man was it hot today!

It is only my second day on the site, but I am already worn out from the heat. Besides the weather, though, today was a great day at Heinlenville. This morning I was screening for a feature where we found a whole cup. It was white with blue characters, and it had a makers mark on the bottom that says it was made in Japan. Though we at first thought it was a tea cup, Julia identified it as a noodle bowl.

Screening through the soil was extremely difficult. It was thick, dark clay that would not easily sift through the mesh screens. I recovered everything from animal bones, glass bottle fragments, rusted nails, and ceramic sherds, but only after fighting a losing battle with the lumpy, unforgiving soil.

Yesterday we opened up an area across the road. Today, I got a chance to explore the refuse dump found there. There are some great pot fragments that look to have been from large storage containers. The deposit also looks to have a great deal of bone, metal, and ceramics. At the very end of the day, Sandra identified odd soil changes happening in one of the corners. I am excited to work on that area more tomorrow and possibly learn the sequencing of the deposits. It might sound silly, but it is kind of like trying to determine, which came first, the chicken or the egg. We need to see if we can determine which color deposit came first and which deposit is on top of the other.

By far, the highlight of the day was a visit from the project’s biggest fan, a boy named Zach. Zach and his mom have come by everyday after school to check out our progress and see what we have found! He is excited to learn about archaeology and to see what we have uncovered. It reminds me why I became an archaeologist in the first place and gives me motivation to withstand the heat, push through the clay, and to recover the treasures hidden below the parking lot. Zach’s visits are also awesome because he brings us snacks! He clearly knows that the way to an archaeologist’s heart is through his/her stomach. Thank you Zach!

Emily Darko
Graduate Student

The Romance of Archaeology (or Lack Thereof)

Greetings from Day 7 of the Heinlenville excavation. I’m here to dispel the myth of the glamorous and exciting career of archaeology. There are no bullwhips or subterranean caverns full of snakes and the Ark of the Covenant. Actually, it’s grueling, painful and after seven days straight, you are downright delirious. Seven days of this also causes an inability to string a grammatically correct sentence together, so for that, I apologize.

Our days are spent in the hot, hot sun. The temperature today is somewhere around 95 degrees Fahrenheit. There has been this cruel ice cream truck playing “Do Your Ears Hang Low” every day, right about the time when our bellies are empty, our brains are tired and sweat is dripping from our brows.

We did have some excitement today. A reporter for a local newspaper came and visited our site. Luckily he missed the time when I was in my newest yoga pose – Upper-Facing Archaeologist – which was caught on film for posterity. After impressing my colleagues with my fierce unit flexibility, I stood up and heard quite a few bones crack and pop. The numbness in my fingers has yet to come back and my hands are full of open wounds and blisters.

As you can imagine, archaeology isn’t for the faint of heart. It is hard work, but at the same time, highly rewarding. Our job is to figure out the histories of those individuals who were not fully recognized or accurately portrayed in the written documents of their time. It would be a tragedy if their histories were lost or misinterpreted.

Mr. Heinlen was a pioneer of his time. While his contribution may not have greatly changed the effects of the entire anti-Chinese sentiment in the western United States, he was a positive force in the lives of those individuals who were lucky enough to reside in his community. His humility and courage to do what was right for individuals who were treated unfairly is what drives us to plow through these grueling, hot days. We are here to help continue his work and let Heinlen’s vision be revisited by current and future generations.

Wow, that makes us sound as if we’re superhuman. We’re all very humble people, but at the end of the day, when we get back to our hotel rooms, peel off our dirty clothes and pop open a delicious cold beer, we can sit back and know all of our hard work contributed something significant to the local community.

Karen Reichardt
Graduate Student

Thea here, good day to you all.

I want to tell everyone about the tours I gave yesterday during public day.

Naomi, AnnMarie and I were the tour guides and took tour groups around the site. We started them talking to Connie at the temple, because she had some really good pictures and she set the stage for why Chinatown moved to this place. It wasn’t as though they ‘fancied a move’, as Adrian said. It was because they were burned out of their original settlement by racist anti-Chinese riots.

One of the people asked why this German guy Heinlen would go to such lengths to help and protect the Chinese. She said it may be because he was from Ohio and people there were very anti-German. German churches were burned, and Germans experienced prejudice just like the Chinese had. It may have invoked empathy in Heinlen. At risk to himself and his family he leased land to the Chinese and even built a fence to help protect them.

One person on my second or third tour was a man who knew families of people who used to live in the Japantown area. As I was pointing out the historic building that is now a Cuban restaurant, he informed me that it used to be a gambling hall. He said that if you look through the alley, there is still this huge fence behind the back door. Apparently they built that fence so the high rollers couldn’t easily escape without paying their bill, and the fence survives today as a remnant.

At the end of the tour as I focused the group’s attention on the three surviving buildings, I tried to stress the importance of being aware that parts of this historic settlement still exist. It isn’t well known, and most of the community doesn’t pay attention. But the past still echoes through; in the original bricks that poke out of the modern stucco; in the shards of broken ceramics that lie inches under the feet of community.

Exposing the public to the richness of San Jose’s past not only facilitates a vast appreciation among the members of the community that joined us on our tours, but will hopefully trickle through more and more people as the friends that joined us talk about their adventures. This is how parts of the past, many of which have been glossed over by the history books, live on to increase the richness and substance of one of California’s most wonderful cities.

Thea Fuerstenberg
Graduate Student