Old Dirt – New Thoughts

Paul Storch, the Senior Objects Curator at the Minnesota Historical Society, recently completed cleaning and conserving a Japanese bronze coin recovered from Unimak.

This coin was found on the floor of the medium-sized house (D-50) at Agayadan Village. I believe this house was abandoned early in the 1760s making this coin among the earliest documented in Alaska. Similar coins are found in earlier sites in the Kuril Islands and Kamchatka. Thousands of Chinese cash coins (along with a few coins from other Asian countries) are found in later 18th and 19th century sites in the Northwest Coast.

The Unimak coin is a Kanei-Tsuho from the Tokugawa Shogunate period. These coins were first manufactured in 1626 AD and continued to be made into the 1860s. Based on several characteristics, this coin is of the ”new style” manufactured after 1688 1668. I hope that we can better identify this coin now that it is clean and legible. I will update this blog when we get further information.

Coin before cleaning -

and after cleaning (Photo by Paul Storch) 

We have spent most of this summer sorting materials from the 2005 field season at Aniakchak. This week we cleaned and “rhoplexed” this interesting bone “knife”. (Rhoplex is an acrylic consolidant useful for preserving ivory, bone and antler artifacts.) I’m not sure of this artifact’s function, but it reminds me of a butter knife. We found it on the house floor in an area where we also recovered a lot of sewing needles. Any ideas on how it may have been used?