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SAN FRANCISCO – You are what you eat, right? Well, a few hundred years down the road the only way people might know anything about you is because of the stuff you didn’t eat – the bones, the cans, the bottles. After all, as any sanitation worker, detective or crazed stalker will tell you, one can tell a lot about somebody by sifting through his garbage. 

And some 225-year-old “garbage” is telling UC Berkeley researchers quite a lot about San Francisco’s first non-indigenous settlers. 

Having been nearly continuously inhabited by Spanish, Mexican and finally American soldiers and their families since 1776, the Presidio is an archaeological gold mine – or rather, a garbage dump. The Funston Avenue Archaeological Research Project’s sites are inundated with a wealth of remnants from the 1770s all the way up to the present, a situation conveniently unearthed by a serendipitous discovery seven years ago. 

“The site was discovered in 1993 back when the U.S. Army was undertaking an environmental remediation program out here,” recalls Barb Voss, a UC Berkeley anthropology graduate student and the archaeological project’s co-coordinator. “I was working for an archaeological consulting firm hired to oversee the process. On one rainy day in May we were removing a fuel oil storage tank behind Building 12 and we discovered some stones that aren’t native to the soil. We weren’t sure what we’d found.” 

Several weeks and several test excavations later, Voss realized just what it was that had been uncovered beneath the old fuel tank – the exposed external foundation of the original Spanish colonial quadrangle (a quadrangle is an open space surrounded on its four sides by buildings). 

The site was on display for the public Tuesday afternoon as Voss and a good number of the 60 volunteers (one-quarter of whom come from Cal, while others hail from universities as far off as Scotland or Australia) spent the day working the fifth-year dig and answering questions for the curious onlookers. 

The original Presidio served as a Spanish military post from its inception in 1776 until the Mexican war of independence ended in 1822. At that time the fort became a Mexican stronghold until transferring over to United States hands in 1848. Military personnel and their families lived on the Presidio up until 1994 – and Voss has the artifacts to prove it. 

Remnants from the Spanish era include adobe bricks, roofing tile (Voss points out that roofs were originally thatched, but the colonists quickly learned that straw roofs and San Francisco weather do not a mixture make), imported and domestically produced pottery and, of course, remains of meals long past. 

“The animal bones present are fairly large-sized, feet, vertebrae, teeth. That points to primary butchering rather than household butchering,” says Voss. “Based on the amount of bones we’ve found, beef stew was probably a mainstay.” 

Moving from the site of the unearthed wall of the eastern wing of the Spanish quadrangle to roughly 75 feet eastward, Voss jokes “we’ve just walked 100 years up in history.” In front of the Victorian officers’ housing erected in 1862 (and still standing), a pit yielding “a wealth of trash from the Civil War period” is teeming with activity. Until 1878, the officers’ housing faced the other direction, meaning the current dig is actually leafing through the Civil War soldiers’ backyards – meaning all the scraps and trash hurled out the back door are now seeing the light of day once more. 

“We’ve found a lovely collection of American artifacts,” says Amy Ramsay, the project’s other co-coordinator and also a UC Berkeley anthropology grad student. “Bottle fragments, handles to silverware, fragments of whiteware (American and English-produced plates), military buttons and lots of other things that say, ‘Hey! You’ve got a nice American period deposit here.’” 

In addition to uncovering a number of broken items that were thrown away, researchers have found artifacts that were, fortunately for posterity, lost. 

“A lot of the children’s toys we found are things I imagine the kids would have liked to have kept,” says Ramsay. “We’ve found so many children’s toys this year, and children are generally not represented well in archaeological recoveries.” 

Archaeologists and students have turned up several-hundred year old marbles, Crackerjack prizes, a miniature Coca-Cola bottle, a Roy Rogers pistol from the 1940s or ’50s and, most recently, toy jet plane wings from the ’70s. 

“During the Civil War period a lot was written about the Presidio and photography was very active,” says Ramsay. “So a lot of people say we have all the answers. But the question is, who was included in the written record? Were the people who were being written about in agreement with those who were writing? 

“Here we see the mundane, day-to-day experience,” continues Ramsay while pointing at the dig. “I want to find artifacts and other indicators in the soil so we can figure out what was going on here in the backyards of Civil War and immediately post-Civil War officers’ quarters.”