Tucson at the Turn of the Century: The Archaeology of Block 83

Summary

During May of 1990, archaeologists investigated the historic remains on Tucson Block 83, still preserved beneath the debris of more recent buildings that had been demolished for construction of a new downtown bus station. With a specially-designed wide blade, a backhoe gently scraped away the foot-deep demolition debris to reveal adobe, brick, and stone house foundations, trash piles, well shafts, and privy pits dating between about 1880 and 1920 (most of them dating to near the turn of the century). Then the archaeologists began the painstaking work of digging layer by layer, sifting every shovelful for discarded household objects and food debris. From historical documents, they had an idea of what they might find. Block 83 was exclusively residential from 1880 through the first decade of this century. During that thirty-year period, the block was shared by single-family houses, boarding houses, and a railroad labor union hall. City directories and county records of deed transfers, fire insurance maps, and family photographs enabled the archaeologists to relate the house foundations and backyard facilities to the names of some of Tucson's important pioneer families—Vasquez, Felix, Radulovich, Brena, Chillson, and others.

At the end of only eight days of digging, all of the historic features had been mapped, many of them had been completely dug out or exposed, and 38,068 historic artifacts had been recovered and carefully bagged for later identification and dating (Table 1.1). Among them were objects one would expect to find in the ruins of an Old West town, including whole and fragmentary ceramic ale bottles, glass beer bottles and whiskey flasks, wood dominoes with bone inlays, rusted iron horseshoes, tarnished silverware, patinated brass cartridge shells, leather harnesses, ceramic chamberpots and spittoons, Indian and Mexican pottery, and proprietary medicine bottles embossed with dubious claims like "Dr. Kilmer's Swamproot Kidney, Liver, and Bladder Cure and Cures All Diseases of the Lung." There were also many unexpected finds that poignantly evoked everyday life in a time of rapid change: a man's pocketwatch; a woman's gold ring; children's porcelain dolls' heads and clay marbles; barely-chipped wine glasses of fancy crystal; a partially full French perfume bottle still sealed by its stopper; bone toothbrushes and knitting needles; buttons of shell, glass, and bone; ivory-colored celluloid combs and a detachable collar; black vulcamzed-rubber combs, syringes, and nozzles; the charred pages of a business ledger with neat hand-penned entries, a whole box of unfired bullets; a 1910 dog tag; and even an unbroken light bulb with filament intact (it could still work!). These were not the stones and bones from a distant past that the archaeologists were used to finding. These were the personal belongings and household discards of people who helped build the Tucson we know today. It was the material culture of early modernity in a Southwest border town.

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Desert Archaeology, Inc.

Prepared By(s): Center for Desert Archaeology

File Information