Hills Bros. coffee was the primary choice of early gold rush cabin dwellers — and the label design changed often enough to where archaeologists can estimate how old Alaska cabin sites are based on the coffee cans left behind.
The year is 1905. You are a prospector in Alaska relaxing in your cabin after a chilly day of working the tailings pile. Craving a cup of joe, you pull a tin of coffee off the shelf. Though you can’t imagine it, that distinctive red can, the one you will later use for your precious supply of nails, will long outlive you. And it will give an archaeologist a good idea of when you made your Alaska home.
Steve Lanford of the Bureau of Land Management in Fairbanks finds Hills Bros. cans valuable because he finds the sturdy cans at old cabin sites all over Interior Alaska. Lanford knows that designers at the company changed the label often enough that the cans are a diagnostic tool helpful in estimating when someone lived at a site.
Lanford has rooted through the trash heaps of old cabin sites and older prehistoric sites throughout the Interior for years. He teamed with BLM’s Robin Mills to produce the field guide to Hills Bros. cans. His goal was to create a tool for archaeologists. In producing the field guide, Lanford took advantage of Hills Bros. designers’ frequent changes. For example, the man on the label has a visible left foot during the years 1932 to 1963, but the “C” in Coffee hides his left foot from 1906 to 1932.
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