I would like to thank the sizeable number of HISTARCH members who
helped to start to educate us all about "cinder blocks" and pressed
conrete blocks and related issues. It has been a gold mine of
information.

I asked my questions too soon. We have now dug a bit deeper and the
foundations of the garage are not "cinder blocks" but rather pressed
rock-faced concrete blocks and there are at least two courses of them.
Still going down !

"Cinder blocks" were certainly around in the 1940s and called by that
name - I remember as a child. They may indeed have contained cinders
(black specks) but I recall the use of the word to refer to porous,
friable gray colored blocks that were, I think, considered to be
somewhat cheap. I have no memory of pressed concrete blocks at all
although there were and are buildings made of them on the scene.

This is all "emic" and, of course, personal. Any typology is certainly
going to be complex: the original producers' view, the views of people
using them (which probably changed over time) and the archaeologist's
system. I confess to being confused but somewhat more enlightened
with the help of our commentors. Some ethnography (oral history) and
some very local documentation (local newspapers) might be interesting
for the town and region we are exploring as well as the Sanborn
Atlas source. I wonder when, or if, the term "cinder block", or
conrete block, first appears in the local sources.


                                        Bob Schuyler
Robert L. Schuyler
University of Pennsylvania Museum
33rd & Spruce Streets
Philadelphia, PA l9l04-6324

Tel: (215) 898-6965
Fax: (215) 898-0657
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