I’m going to attempt the impossible today. Unlike Alice, I’ve already had my breakfast, so hopefully that’s all we need to make it possible. Let’s talk about the CAP database and – this is the impossible bit – I shall do my very best to make a blog post about a designing, compiling and populating a database of interest to more than data nerds like me…
As a child, I thought I was Alice. As an adult, I am increasingly, painfully aware I’m the white rabbit, stressed and constantly running late. Image: Sir John Tenniel, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
For those who are unaware, the Christchurch Archaeology Project is currently working on a somewhat ambitious project to take all the information – histories, archaeological data, artefact records, etc. – gathered from archaeological work in Ōtautahi since the earthquakes and make it freely available to everyone through a huge database and website. We got funding for this from Manatū Taonga, which was amazing, and have been spending the last few months designing and building it, with the assistance of the wonderful people at Intranel. It’s a hell of an undertaking, to be blunt. There have been several occasions on which my brain has – for lack of a better work – ‘blue-screened’, but we have persisted and, honestly, what we’re managing to create is so cool. I can’t wait for you all to see it properly.
My brain, some days.
As we’ve talked about before, here on the website and in previous blog posts, the scale of archaeological information recovered from Ōtautahi Christchurch since the earthquakes was unprecedented in many ways, not just because of the number of artefacts found or the number of archaeological features excavated, but because of the sheer variety and scope of the sites, projects and material culture excavated. Archaeology in Christchurch since 2011 has extended across most of the city’s urban landscape, uncovering evidence of so many different aspects of the city’s history and development. The concentration of this work over such a short period of time has also really highlighted the inter-connected nature of the archaeological and historical landscape, as we encountered the same people across multiple sites, found similarities and differences in the archaeology of different parts of the city and saw patterns in land ownership, urban development and the city’s built heritage. At the same time, however, the data itself exists in disparate, separate datasets – the city has been excavated site by site, project by project as the post-earthquake recovery necessitated archaeological investigation bit by bit. We’ve seen those connections and patterns in what seems like fleeting glimpses – we know they’re there but we can’t easily tease them out until we have all of the information in one place, accessible and searchable. Perhaps more importantly, this information belongs to the city – all this archaeological work has uncovered a rich history that belongs to the past, present and future residents of Ōtautahi Christchurch, to the people who live here, who have lived here, whose ancestors lived here, none of whom can currently access it with any ease.
I tried to manually map connections for a set of sites once. It did not go well, given the file name of this image is ‘political flowchart of doom’. Image: J. Garland.
To really get your head around the project and what we’re doing, it helps to think about scale and the ways that we frame stories, especially stories of people and place. Here, although archaeological work in Christchurch has occurred on a site-by-site basis, what we really have in the end is an archaeology of the city, the story of the city as a whole told through the stories of its people, its places and its material culture. It’s just like the city itself, really. Christchurch, like all places, has an identity that is formed by its history, by the landscape, the cityscape, the community and the ideas that the residents and non-residents alike have of who the city is. I’ve always thought about cities as people (I’m not alone in that, if anyone has read N. K. Jemisin’s work, for example), individual entities with personalities and atmosphere and a sense of something that is more than the sum of their parts.
When you frame a place like this, as one big entity instead of a whole lot of individual components, there are details of that place that fall out of focus, because they matter less at this perspective – for example, each of the suburbs of Christchurch also have their own distinct personalities (sometimes this goes down to the street level!), but these become overshadowed by the city when we consider it as a whole. Similarly, there are aspects that come into focus more when viewed from the broader perspective – we see more of the connections between places, more of the similarities and shared characteristics, the things that make the city distinct, especially when compared to other cities.
I think of the database in a similar way. We are broadening our perspective on all the archaeological information generated by our work here over the last decade, to better enable us to see the connections and find the shared characteristics of the city’s archaeology and history on that large scale. We are also, however, also making sure that if we want to look at the small scale, we can – the details that can be lost at the large scale, like individual people, sites, single artefacts or specific archaeological features, are all still there for us to find if we want to. Essentially, we’re using the database to do what a human brain struggles with – to hold all of this data at the same time, so that we can move between perspectives to explore the city’s history at whatever scale we like.
Each of these artefacts has so many stories to tell, from so many different perspectives. Image: J. Garland.
My job has been to try and create a network of information that lets us do this, finding the connections between the different types of data generated by the archaeology of the city and trying to be sure that we have enough detail to showcase the individuality of sites and people and archaeology as well as enough standardisation, ways of grouping data and ways of filtering information to also showcase the similarities and connections between all of this. I won’t go into the specifics of this (but it will all be available on our website in the end, so you can go and trawl through it if you really want to!), because, quite honestly, it’s a LOT. It has broken my brain on more than one occasion.
Our wonderful CAP team – Sayali, Sam, Ebony and Madi, thank you! – have been going through archaeological reports produced since the earthquakes and pulling out information to be entered into the database and website. It has been something of a crash course in Christchurch’s history and landscape for them, not to mention a journey of discovery through all kinds of archaeological finds and historic stories. To date, they’ve entered information on more than 800 places (land parcels, subdivisions, surveyed sections), almost 1500 people, 300 organisations and buildings and have teased out almost 2000 connections between those people and those places. We’re recording the connections between people as well, from the familial – brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, cousins – to commercial and social connections, like who employed who. In one memorable case, we even have a criminal connection between someone who crashed his cart into someone else in 1900. These people and places and organisations are all then linked – when possible! – to our archaeological data, to the artefacts and the sites and the archaeological features, slotting each of those jigsaw pieces in next to each other to form a more complete picture of the city’s story. We already have detailed records of almost 2000 archaeological contexts (things like rubbish pits, layers, wells, brick features, bridges, cellars, drains, tram tracks, road layers, underfloor deposits, postholes, even an animal burial!) and with those contexts, the records for more than 18,000 artefacts (44,000 fragments) ready to be made available online to anyone who wants to look at them. If those numbers don’t seem like a lot, I promise they’re growing rapidly, but maybe a better way of conveying the scale is that across all the different records and datasets, the team has recorded 140,000 pieces of information (not including the artefacts), from feature measurements to the marital status of early Christchurch residents to who analysed and excavated what.
When I looked up His Lordship’s Larder (see next paragraph), I thought I would get advertisements for the business, maybe some shenanigans at the hotel, not this. Image: South Canterbury Times 12/03/1886: 3.
I’m going to leave you today with a handful of stories and bits of information that have stood out to the team as they’ve been working through all the data. My personal favourites (except for all the artefacts, obviously) are the interesting names people used for their businesses. Did you know there was a hotel in Christchurch called “His Lordship’s Larder Hotel”? Or that there was another one called the “Robin Hood Inn”? I will also never forget the story of J. Hare, poor person, the inquest into whose death recorded that he had “died by visitation of god”. Your guess is as good as mine, there.
Lyttelton Times 14/06/1864: 6.
One of the team loved the story of Charles Cox, who was involved in shoe polish fraud from his Harvey Terrace section, a crime for which we found archaeological evidence. There was also the story of James Lee Goon, a Chinese boarding house proprietor who was arrested as a brothel keeper in the 1890s, at the same time as a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment was prevalent in New Zealand. We’ve come across prominent figures in their everyday lives, such as Julius Von Haast and his family renting a house on Armagh Street in the 1880s, and common place materials in unexpected situations, like the use of clinker (metalworking waste) in roads and landscape modification. There have been great artefacts (time capsules!) - one of our team mentioned that she’s coming to realise that there are quite a lot of cool belt buckles in nineteenth century Christchurch – and aspects of life in the historical city that hadn’t been considered, but make sense when you think about it, like the number of cart-on-cart accidents and subsequent arrests. Dangerous driving, it’s been a thing for much longer than you’d think. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, everyone working on the project has come to have that duality of vision that happens to anyone who works with or learns the history or archaeology of a place, simultaneously seeing two cities around them as they live in the Christchurch that is and work with the Christchurch that was.
An sinister snake buckle. Image: Maria Lillo Bernabeu.
Two 1920s time capsules from the foundations of the Nugget Boot Polishing Factory on Ferry Road and an account of some cart related crime. Image: Andy Dodd (left) and Star 22/05/1902: 3.
This is just a tiny taste of what this project will be. I could write a whole post just listing the research potential of a dataset like this. Every day, the team are adding more and more data and we will eventually have something fantastic that will, I hope, allow any of us to see these stories whenever we like, with whatever framing we prefer.
Jessie