Tile fragments from a burned adobe house, a bottle of Mrs. Winslow's soothing syrup and colored chips of ancient dinner plates are part of a vast cache of artifacts being scrubbed, studied and meticulously catalogued in a new laboratory at what was once El Presidio de San Francisco.
The entire Presidio is officially part of the nation's only urban national park, but its historic center is also a site where soldiers and civilians from three nations - and the Ohlone people long before them- left traces of their lives when they moved on or died.
Those traces now fill thousands of carefully labeled transparent plastic bags held in 1,000 numbered cardboard boxes, and the contents of each box awaits detailed analysis by archaeologists working in the two laboratory buildings that will open to the public next year. The buildings are two converted 1940s-era garages standing next to the old Presidio Officers Club, and when they open there will be changing displays of the most interesting artifacts, tours of the lab and public lectures by the Presidio's archaeologists.
The scientists have already collected 526,000 individual artifacts, all variously dated from the ninth through the 20th centuries, according to Liz Clevenger, curator of archaeology for the Presidio Trust, which runs the park.
"There's a special excitement handling these remnants of so many past lives, and a pleasure in the research we do - research into so many people who never made it into the history books," said Clevenger.
The other day, two recent graduates of UC Berkeley's archaeology and anthropology departments were hard at work in the laboratory as paid interns, leaning over basins of muddy water and wielding toothbrushes to scrub brown detritus off every item - adobe brick chunks as big as a fist, specks of unburned charcoal, each almost as small as a grain of sand, and bottles of all shapes, sizes and ages.
Most of the material they worked on came from recent digs at the Presidio's Pershing Square, a site inside the boundaries of the fort the Spanish built in 1776. It's also where the home of General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing later stood before it burned down in 1915, killing his wife and three daughters.
Other treasures have also emerged unexpectedly from another area near Crissy Field, not because archaeologists were digging there, but because Caltrans bulldozers unearthed them while working on the new Doyle Drive. Somehow the soothing syrup bottle had landed there - a relic from some baby teething in the 1800s.
"We're looking at 200 years of history," said Sarah Giffin, a Berkeley archaeology grad, as she scrubbed away at a clutch of gopher teeth dug from an earthen animal tunnel beneath what once had been an adobe building. Its purpose in the Spanish fort is as yet unknown.
"This isn't really my field," Giffin said as she examined the teeth. "I'm more into the Bronze Age Greeks, but it's all fascinating."
Opposite Giffin sat Elizzabeth Campos, the anthropologist, cleaning chips of glazed earthenware that archaeologists call majolica, perhaps from a time long before the Spanish came, and just right for Campos to study.
"Oh, neat - my time!" she said as she scrubbed.
At Berkeley Campos had done her field work at Brooks Island, an East Bay regional shoreline hilltop where the Ohlone Indians lived for 2,000 years before the Spanish built El Presidio.
But scrubbing artifacts ignores time, for along with the majolica were fragments of blue and white china, possibly brought to California aboard one of the Manila galleons that carried porcelain and other treasures from China. These ships stopped in Monterey on their way to Mexico in the 1800s with cargo for the Spanish settlements along the California coast.
Aided by high-tech tools like ground-penetrating radar, the Presidio Trust's archaeologists are steadily unearthing history. Their excavation sites lie within the old fort square, at El Polin Springs and in nearby Tennessee Hollow, where Spanish civilian settlers built homes outside the fort's protection.
By 1848, when Mexico ceded California and the southwest to America, American soldiers moved in, and today the Presidio's archaeologists are unearthing relic after relic from the days when soldiers of the Spanish-American War and two world wars were stationed there.
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