Insulated!

I forgot, in dismissing my pictures of racing, that I’d slipped in a My Archaeology Hat Doesn’t Come Off one. I figured if you’re sticking around this blog, that one might interest you most! Follow me below the jump. It’s big because I want you to be able to see the details.

The road into the racetrack ran beside a train track, which had its own set of now-disused power poles. You can’t see in this picture, but many of them had wires hanging off at random. That’s not the cool part. Squint at the insulators sticking up where once wires would have attached along the length of the cross-pieces. Historical archaeology-wise, insulators are awesome. Their designs were usually patented or recorded, and so we can often date them pretty precisely. You can see two different shapes up there, which suggests to me some were replaced after the first batch was put in. They also survive pretty well, once they’ve fallen off into the archaeological record we’re usually digging in. Those aqua glass ones on top are solid puppies, with a good three or four inches between the top and the top of the inner threaded surface. I tried to get the color to show, too. Very saturated!

The ones below are ceramic ones. They’re often a very fetching rust-brown color. They’re also fun, because while all the aqua glass ones tend to be very similar in shape to the ones here, the ceramic ones can get crazy with the number of “hats” in their hat stack kinda shape. (Just to be warn you–those aren’t technical terms. I made them up. Shhhhh.)

So now if you find one in an old shed, you’ll know what it is!