Tag: artifact

Bottle Hunters Clash With Archaeologists

  • Though archaeologists may disagree, diggers Fortemeyer and Jordan say it’s better to dig quickly – maybe even sloppily – then to not dig at all.(Photo courtesy of Samara Freemark)

Archaeologists are not happy with bottle hunters. Bottle hunters spend their free time digging up outdoor privies – or, 19th century toilets. They’re looking for old glass bottles. But as Samara Freemark reports, they’re catching flak from the professionals.

Transcript

Archaeologists are not happy with bottle hunters. Bottle hunters spend their free time digging up outdoor privies – or, 19th century toilets. They’re looking for old glass bottles. But as Samara Freemark reports, they’re catching flak from the professionals.

If you ever went looking for buried treasure when you were a kid, maybe you can begin to understand just how crazy people can get about digging up bottles.

Take Jack Fortemeyer. When I met him, he was neck-deep in a hole in a backyard in Brooklyn. He was shoveling out a 19th century privy with his partner Scott Jordan. Not so bad for a 70 year old man.

“I told the kids you guys are going to have to do the digging while I sit up on the top in a wheelchair and you’re going to pass me the bottles and so forth. I’m getting to that point.”

Fortemeyer is a bottle digger – a person who digs up backyard privy pits looking for old bottles. The ones they find, they clean and keep. Or they sell them, or trade them with other collectors. Fortemeyer says he’s been hooked for decades.

“Found some bottles, had to find out about them, bought a book, and now I’m hopelessly addicted to it.”

Fortemeyer used to live in suburban Long Island. But he moved to Brooklyn because the buildings here are older. Older buildings mean privy pits – And privy pits… mean bottles.

“That’s why I moved to the neighborhood. To be closer to my pits. To be….I mean, that’s what it’s all about.”

“Jack, I see something….there’s a bottle there…”

So far today Fortemeyer and Jordan have dug up a nice collection of 19th century artifacts. Jordan spreads the pieces they like on a table.

“There’s a tiny piece of black pottery with floral design. a fragment of an 1840s teapot. A brass shirt button, little tiny stars going around the edge.”

He’s in the middle of describing them to me when I trip and step on a shard of pottery that’s been tossed on the ground.

“I think I….don’t worry about that. I think I just stepped on a plate and broke it.
Just more work for me. If we’re laying it on the ground, it’s not that important.”

What is it? Part of a white plate. So typical a lot of it doesn’t get kept.

And that moment right there is maybe the perfect example of why bottle diggers drive some professional archaeologists completely up the wall.

“It just makes us crazy. The bottle hunter, it’s all for them.”

That’s Joan Geisamar. She’s a member of the Professional Archaeologists of New York City – or the P-A-N-Y-C and yes, that acronym is pronounced ‘panic’.

“I have to confess the acronym came before the name, because we’re always in a panic about what’s going on.”

Geisamar says bottle diggers destroy the archaeological record. Professionals dig slowly. Painstakingly. They catalog every fragment, no matter how unglamorous. Diggers, she says, just barge in with shovels, looking for pretty things.

“They take what they want and throw everything else back in. It’s just a record that’s completely lost for personal gain and selfishness. Once it’s lost, it’s lost. And it’s
just morally wrong and professionally wrong.”

But Scott Jordan says in a place like New York, where there’s always development going on, it’s better to dig quickly – maybe even sloppily – then to not dig at all.

“There’s enough being destroyed left and right that we can’t even keep up with it
ourselves. There are so many sites, especially during the building boom in New
York where entire blocks are lost. If we’re there it’s gonna be thrown in a dump truck, put in a landfill. So those artifacts will just be lost.”

He pointed at the schoolyard next door. The playground had been slated for redevelopment. The diggers wanted to get in there. They offered to do presentations at the school, show the kids what they found. Everyone was interested. But jumping through all the official hoops took too long, and in the end, the yard was bulldozed and the site was lost.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

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Protecting Art From Climate Change

  • Climate change can affect temperature and humidity. And those changes can damage art. (Photo source: Aude at Wikimedia Commons)

Preservationists are worried climate
change could destroy valuable art
and cultural artifacts. Kyle Norris
reports thay are looking at ways to
protect these valuables:

Transcript

Preservationists are worried climate
change could destroy valuable art
and cultural artifacts. Kyle Norris
reports thay are looking at ways to
protect these valuables:

Climate change can affect temperature and humidity. And those changes can
damage art. Debbie Norris is the chair of the art conservation department
at the University of Delaware.

“Fluctuations in temperature and relative humidity can cause art
materials to crack and craze and deteriorate over time.”

Changes in the weather can also cause biological growth on artifacts. So,
for example, mold can grow on old photos or damage historic documents.

Some buildings that house art are very old and made of stone or wood.
Those building materials are deteriorating faster than they have in the
past. And many of those buildings are not equipped with heating and
cooling equipment advanced enough to control the climate inside the
buildings. That puts the collections they house at risk.

For The Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

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The Dark Side of Bright Lights

  • Most of us are using 125-year-old technology to light our homes. 95-percent of the energy used by a light bulb is heat. Only five-percent actually is used to produce light. (Photo courtesy of the National Museum of American History, gift of the Department of Engineering, Princeton University, 1961)

Many of us say we want to be good environmentalists. But we often make choices based on other desires. One of those choices is lighting. Most of us use lights that are very inefficient… and the trend in home lighting is moving toward using more energy… not less. As part of the series, “Your Choice; Your Planet,” the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham takes a look at light bulbs… and starts at the beginning:

Transcript

Many of us say we want to be good environmentalists. But we often make choices based on other desires. One of those choices is lighting. Most of us use lights that are very inefficient, and the trend in home lighting is moving toward using more energy, not less. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham takes a look at light bulbs and starts at the beginning:


We’re getting a behind the scenes look at a pretty significant historical artifact. Marc Gruether is pulling back a plastic tarpaulin that covers a row of file cabinets.


Gruether: “We are in one of the storage areas in the Henry Ford Museum. And drawer eleven has this light bulb in it which I will very carefully remove. It’s certainly one of the oldest Edison light bulbs that’s in existence. This is one of the lamps that was used in the December 1879 demonstration at Menlo Park.”


Graham: “Now, looking at it, I can see that it’s got that kind of bulbous shape, I can see the filament, I mean, I would recognize this easily as a light bulb.”


Gruether: ““Absolutely. It’s a recognizable light bulb. You’re exactly right. That all looks forward to the kind of lamp forms that became common and that we’d recognize today.”


And that’s not all that’s the same. Just like the first light bulbs, the incandescent bulbs most of us use in our homes today, waste energy. 95% of the energy used is expended in heat. Only five-percent actually makes light. That means everytime you switch on the light – if it’s an incadescent bulb – you’re wasting 95% of the electricity your paying for. In our homes, not much has changed in the last hundred years or so. But in commercial buildings, things have changed a lot.


Commercial builders and industrial architects learned a long time ago that energy efficiency is important. Most of the new office building and factories built today use passive sunlight and high-efficiency lighting that not only saves energy but uses the right spectrum of light to get the best output from their employees.


Moji Navvab teaches about light in architecture at the University of Michigan. He says you can learn a lot about good energy efficient light too. He says with the wide variety of fluorescent, LED, and spot lighting, you can get the right kind of light for whatever you’re doing and use a lot less electricity compared to a house lit only by traditional incandescent bulbs. It’s about using the right light for the right place. Navvab says, really, it’s pretty simple and you can get a lot of information about proper lighting on the Internet.


“If you really are focusing on healthy lighting or you want to save energy, if you go search on the web right away, you can get the information and then you can go to your local stores and they can match it for you.”


But at the local store, most of the time buyers are not very well-informed at all.


Beverly Slack is a salesperson at Kendall Lighting in Okemos, Michigan. She says unless they ask, she doesn’t push energy efficient lighting. And when she does mention fluorescent lighting, which uses about one-fourth the energy that incadescent bulbs use, customers grimace.


“Right. But, they don’t realize the difference in the fluorescent lamps, how they’ve changed, how the different colors have changed in the fluorescents. They’re still thinking of the old standard cool white so, people don’t want them because of that fact.”


Slack says what customers really want is dramatic lighting, and lots of it. They want trendy, recessed lights and track lights that often use extremely hot burning bulbs in a way that’s interesting, but not often very useful.


“They want decorative, decorative, decorative. I mean, it’s amazing. Because I can just see their light bills going sky high.”


Slack says the trend in home lighting in recent years has been just the opposite of commercial lighting. At home, people are using more light, more fixtures, and less energy efficient bulbs. With the trend in new houses being larger, requiring more lights, and homeowners wanting decorative lighting to show off their big new houses, conservation at home is often just being ignored.


It’s no longer about turning off the light when you leave the room, it’s about lighting up the showplace. And as long as the power bill is lower than the mortgage, it’ll probably stay that way.


For the GLRC, this is Lester Graham.

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