Mount Lowe Archaeological Project

Welcome back to the Mount Lowe Archaeology Project website! This field season has already started off on the right foot with some exciting finds during Week One of the project. Below I (Stacey Camp) discuss some of our preliminary findings. We hope you will continue to check out our updates as the season progresses. Last year’s updates will also be placed on this website shortly.

Day One began with volunteers setting up tents to work under for the rest of the season, Stacey mapping and re-establishing the grid from last year, and conducting another surface collection of artifacts that had been uncovered thanks to the rain and wind of the 2005-2006 year. Stacey also laid out a few excavation units so that the team could get going on the digging on Day Two.

The rest of the week was spent excavating two units – B1 and B2 – which are both located inside the section house. B2 is located near what we believe to be a cooking feature/hearth. So far, B2 has produced a headless porcelain doll, a fish vertebrae (identified by Kristin Lynn Nado, a Stanford student volunteering on the project), and lots and lots of melted glass! B1, placed a meter South of one of our test excavation units (Unit 1) from last year), produced a large number of buttons and beads throughout the week. Unit 1 also produced a similar amount of buttons and beads, which leads me (Stacey) to believe that this area of the household was used for laundry and sewing. The reform movement instigated by Pacific Electric Railway required that Mexican women practice sewing, and if they ignored the corporation’s requests, they were not allowed to visit their family and friends in downtown Los Angeles via railway passes.

In B1, we have also uncovered a penny dating 1915, a portion of a doorknob, a porcelain ball (possibly a marble or decoration), and several bullet casings. Amy Amberger, one of the students volunteering at the site, researched the casings in detail. Here’s what she has to say about them:

“On one of the bullet shells that we found on the first day we were able to read the bottom and find out that it belonged to a colt .44. The gun was made in about the 1860s but the ammunition was so good that many other manufacturers made their weapons to work with it. Consequently thousands of guns have been made to fit the shell all the way into the late 1920’s. Given that there were so many guns made it is hard to tell what kind the people at the site may have used. However, on the second day we found more shells. One of which was the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. 32 WCF. Looking this shell up it was found that the first repeating rifles that Winchester made also happen to fit the colt .44. These rifles were made from 1866 to 1873 (these also just happen to be the model numbers for the rifles). So it is possible that the people who lived at the house may have had a Winchester.”

On Friday, my car had some issues so we worked a half-day on the site. We removed brush from the “cesspool” area of the site, mapped the bricks related to the cooking feature in B2, and dismantled the tents and covered up the site to prepare for the weekend. Lloyd, a mechanic from Pasadena Ford, fixed my car. We chatted about the site and he had something interesting to say about the buttons. Apparently, his Hispanic mother used to take the buttons off of worn out shirts and save them in a small box for future sewing projects. The old shirts would then be used to patch up torn clothing.

We continue to run into fascinating people up at the site – each visitor seems to have their own story to tell about Echo Mountain’s past, present, and sometimes even future! If you are interested in getting up to the site or have a story to share about it, please contact me at scamp@stanford.edu or 626.429.2912. We typically work Monday through Friday, 7am to 3:30pm on site. We hope to see you at Echo Mountain soon!