Today I was putting several items back into collections storage from an old exhibit in Hawaiian Hall. I came across some really beautiful glass bottles. One of these bottles was embossed with Lubin Parfumeur a Paris. It was excavated from the Anahulu valley of northwestern O’ahu.
One of the things I love about historic archaeology (archaeology after there are written records), is that you can usually find out a great deal about the artifacts. This particular bottle was manufactured in the late 1880s by the Lubin parfume boutique in Paris. The company still exists, still makes perfume, and has been around since 1798. In 1830, it became the first perfume maker to come to the United States.
Sites in the Anahulu valley show artifact changes over time that mirror the political and economic changes in the Islands during the 1800s. Capt. Cook, a British explorer, was the first westerner to come to the Hawaiian Islands in 1778. Shortly thereafter, contact with the British, French, and Americans became a regular occurrence with missionaries and businessmen pouring into the Islands. The archaeologists that excavated the Anahulu sites found artifacts that pointed to this time in-between late prehistoric and early historic periods. There were clearly traditional Hawaiian practices that were still important, such as the use of stone poi pounders, kukui nuts, the taro root crop, catching shellfish from the stream, and living in rockshelters. However there are also indications that inhabitants benefited from some of the new types of objects they could buy; metal buttons, glass beads, glass bottles were frequently found.
This little glass bottle is a window into the Hawaiian past at a time of great cultural, political, and economic change. Just one of the cool things I’ve come across as I work with the Museum’s collections!
Aliens are attacking a baseball field a few blocks down on our street. But thankfully Rihanna is there to save everyone.