ALBANY COUNTY — Long before the Industrial Revolution, before people’s lives were filled with mass-produced goods, those who lived here made or traded for the items that furnished their homes.

This month, the New York State Museum announced its acquisition of over 100,000 archaeological artifacts documenting the lives of 17th-Century dwellers in the Albany area — both the European settlers and the Native peoples.

The pieces of the past were unearthed in the early 1970s under the direction of Dr. Paul Huey: 36,000 artifacts are from Fort Orange, which was built by the Dutch West India Company in 1624, and over 80,000 are from Schuyler Flatts, on the floodplain of the Hudson River north of Albany, named after Phillip Schuyler who acquired, in 1672, the farm that had been established in 1643.

The State Museum is planning an exhibit of the artifacts for next year.

“It dovetails nicely with other collections of the New Netherlands period, from Manhattan,” said  Michael Lucas, curator of historical archeology for the museum. “They both have material predating Dutch settlement.”

Among the artifacts are pieces of pottery, spear points, and stone tools from the Mahican people “who lived here for thousands of years,” Lucas said. “You can see how their lives changed through time.”

Lucas said, “The most important thing about these two collections is the context they provide” in relation to each other as the separate societies — the Native Americans and the European settlers — interacted and evolved over time.

Fort Orange artifacts are dated by layers from floods that occurred.

“You can see how the fort changed from its early development in 1624 till its final demise in the middle 1660s … It’s a time capsule between flood layers,” said Lucas.

In an archaeological dig, he said, “You look at time, going down through the ground … You go back in time as you dig down. And you look at space … We know where some of the buildings were in the fort.”

Reading history through artifacts

Lucas described some of the artifacts, pictured here:

The Fort Orange collection contains a Kaolin pipe bowl — white clay shaped like the face of a mustached man wearing a turban. Lucas said it was a later piece, well over a century past the early-17th-Century founding of Fort Orange. “It tells you about consumer choice, what were the interests of the Schuyler family … It was probably a costlier pipe … It shows how they wanted to present themselves.”

Clothing and common household objects let “people know who was powerful and who wasn’t,” he said.

Another object from the Fort Orange collection is a mystery — it is carved of an unknown material, looking rather like four geometric petals of a flower.

“It almost looks like Fort Orange,” mused Lucas. “It’s a mold of some sort … Even Paul doesn’t know what it is,” he said of Huey.

Lucas explained that curators and archaeologists share “a lot of camaraderie,” posting online unidentified artifacts or sending descriptions and pictures out on Listservs. “Someone else on a Colonial site in Maine or the Chesapeake area or Amsterdam may have seen something similar,” he said. “Ninety percent of what you find, someone knows what it is.”

A lion-face relief from the Fort Orange collection, which Lucas called “an evocative piece,”  is German stoneware, he said. “It’s part of a jug or a tankard … You see a lot of German stoneware in Colonial context … Germany dominated the stoneware industry. All these goods came through the Netherlands.”

The Germans also made black glass Cossack buttons for missionaries, which were traded in volume for furs, he said.

A delft tile from the early 17th Century pictures a dog. “Some had animal figures. Others had Biblical scenes,” said Lucas. “They were used around the fireplace hearth.”

Two cultures collaborated

The Dutch were trading with both the Mahicans and the Mohawks, Lucas said. “The Mahican people were Algonquian. They had a different language than the Mohawk and different pottery … In the 1400s and 1500s, various villages up and down the Hudson exchanged goods and ideas.”

The Mahican spoke Algonquian and the Mohawk spoke Iroquoian. The Dutch built relationships with both tribes.

“You see trade beads on all kinds of sites; the Dutch traded the beads with Native Americans for beaver,” he said.

Metal harps — “a whimsical musical thing” — were popular to trade with the Native Americans … You find them in sites from the 17th and 18th centuries.”

Jesuit rings were also used for trading, as were whistles made out of pipe stems. “They’d cut holes in them,” said Lucas.

“You do see the continuation of traditions,” said Lucas. For example, when the Dutch traded copper kettles with Native Americans, the Mahicans wouldn’t use the kettles for cooking the way the Europeans did. Instead, he said, they would use the kettles in a way that fit their own cultural traditions. “They would cut them up and make arrowheads or make adornments,” said Lucas.

The Mohawks would do the same with the ax heads that the Europeans traded with them. Lucas stressed, “They would appropriate them into their own cultural frames.”

It worked the other way, too. Because, when the Dutch traded kettles or rings or whistles or beads for beaver, they did not use the animals the way the Native people did, for food or warm clothes; instead, they made tall top hats.

Dr. James W. Bradley, in the state museum bulletin, “Before Albany, An Archaeology of Native-Dutch Relations in the Capital Region, 1600-1664,” writes that the results are usually catastrophic when two cultures — like the Dutch settlers and the ancient inhabitants of the Hudson Valley — collide.

“The technologically superior culture dominates and distrust, exploitation, even annihilation of the other culture are the result,” he writes. “But something different happened in the upper Hudson Valley when Dutch entrepreneurs came first to trade and then to settle.”

Unlike the Native-European interaction in other parts of America, like New England and Virginia, the two very different cultures learned to live together.

“This different relationship was based on a sense of mutual opportunity, of seeing more advantage in cooperation than in conflict,” writes Bradley.

He goes on, “As contacts grew, this tendency to work together was enhanced by a gradual increase in understanding, and occasionally even respect, in spite of the profound cultural differences.”

The fur trade helped each side get what it wanted. “More cordial relations with Native people also made possible the establishment of stable Dutch communities such as Beverwijck, the predecessor of present-day Albany,” writes Bradley. “A measure of Beverwijck’s unique success is that it was one of the few European settlements never attacked by Native people in spite of its remote frontier location.”

Stewards of history

The oldest artifact in the museum’s collection from historical archeology — as opposed to the earlier prehistoric archaeology — is from New Amsterdam, now Manhattan. It is a little token dated 1590, made as a souvenir, “a celebration of the joining of the provinces,” said Lucas.

He described it as a fist holding arrows representing six provinces in the Netherlands, dedicated to Prince Maurice.

“Our primary role,” Lucas said, “is we’re the stewards of the collection, holding the trust for the citizens of New York.”

The museum is also involved in conserving the artifacts it has so that they survive in perpetuity, he said. Lucas noted, for example, that, when metal objects are taken out of the ground, they rust.

“We don’t put them in a case under lock and key,” he said. The artifacts are part of museum exhibits and are also used in “behind-the-scenes tours for small groups who request them.”

Schools, from the elementary level through high school, use the museum’s artifacts as “teaching tools,” said Lucas, noting, “We’re part of the State Education Department.”

He went on, “We’re not just Albany-based.” Items are arranged to be loaned to exhibits throughout the state.

Another important charge is for collections to be used in research. Currently, Lucas said, giving an example, Paul Huey is looking at marbles from the collection. The word “knickerbocker,” Lucas said, means “marble maker.” Marbles were used in a variety of games in the 17th Century.

Flat discs are among the many gaming pieces that archeologists have unearthed. Lucas is particularly interested in a game called Trictrac, which is similar to backgammon.

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” he said, noting that replacement pieces for Trictrac were made from redware or from blue-and-white delft.

He noted that, in 17th-Century Dutch paintings of tavern scenes, “You see these Trictrac tables a lot.” The pieces were probably originally wooden. “You use your imagination to figure it out,” he said.

Lucas went on, “What archaeologists do, you don’t have proof, you go on the preponderance of evidence. You build a case.

“Twenty years from now, someone with more evidence will be able to figure out more. These collections are forever. People can reinterpret.”

Lucas concluded of the recent acquisition of the artifacts from Fort Orange and Schuyler Flatts, “This is an ongoing process. We’re still in the midst of organizing … We’ll try to make this stuff as available as we can — online and in museums, so people understand what they have …

“This is the property of all the citizens of New York. It’s their history.”