Ron:

My dissertation is under my previous name, so if you did a searched for
Cathy Spude, you wouldn't find it. Citation is:

Blee, Catherine Holder
  1991  Sorting Functionally-Mixed Artifact Assemblages With Multiple
Regresion: A Comparative Study in Historical Archeology. University of
Colorado - Boulder.

You can get it through University Microfilms, International, or borrow it
from CU. I understand UMI now has a way you can download dissertations over
the internet, but I don't know if mine is available that way or not, since
its more than 10 years old.

The statistical problem may not be of much interest to you, but I included
artifact inventories, some basic descriptive statistics, and other
references that might help you out with your military study. There should
be enough data that you could pull out the button information for yourself,
if you wanted.

However, I'd be careful about associating the buttons with men without
careful testing. Remember that the higher frequencies of generic personal
items I mentioned are also a function of frequencies in other artifact
categories that might be associated with the absense of women. For
instance, I found that the transient men in both their residences and the
military sites had very low frequencies of liquor bottles (contrary to
expectation), suggesting they were going elsewhere to drink (if women were
present they were staying home). Those low frequency categories raised the
overall relative frequency of generic personal items (this is really
over-simplifying, needless to say). Women in the home, or in other
contexts, were associated with higher frequencies of other categories of
artifacts, too, which is all too complicated to go into here. Also, the
hotels had lower frequencies of stuff that households, saloons and brothels
had high frequencies of, which might "drive up" the frequencies of generic
personal items.

My point is, its pretty complicated, but the hypothesis does bear looking
at. I certainly want to think some more about it as I continue to refine
and develop some of my thinking on gender markers. I, too, inherited a
cookie tin full of buttons from one of my grandmothers when she died (but
only after a cousin had carefully culled it for the valuable ones, so I was
told. I did end up with some nice plain bone buttons of the type we all
find on our sites, not to mention scads of "prosser" buttons). She lived on
a farm most of her life. The other grandmother did not have a button box,
and came from a long line of urban dwellers with some money. Maybe button
collecting was a socio-economic indicator as well.

My own experience with rags on an "archeological" site suggests that
buttons were cut off before the rags were used. Again, this might be
socio-economic thing, in which buttons were important for re-use among some
of the more frugal households. On the site where I had some experience with
"rags," they were used as chinking between logs in a cabin, and had fallen
out onto the floor of the attic. Then about a century of dust had
accumulated on top of them. I "excavated" with an industrial sized vacuum
cleaner. No buttons on any of the rags-turned-chinking.

As for military hospitals, my dissertation does reference and discuss four
military sites. Because I was trying to get at generalized patterns, I did
not separate out hospitals, so I don't remember if there were distinct
hospital deposits at those sites. They might help you, though.

However, I once did an excavation of a Russian hospital trash pit in Sitka,
Alaska, dating to about 1860. I remember the trash containing some US
Medical Corps bottles, which made dating and even cultural ascription a
little dicey for awhile, but I eventually decided the Russians were getting
their supplies from anywhere they could, with only a little bit of stuff
from Russia. Most of it was coming from the Hudson's Bay Company, their
biggest competitor, or from American outposts. What's the time frame for
your work? Do you want a citation for that as well?

Finally, I vaguely recall that Rex Wilson did some work at the hospital at
Fort Union, New Mexico. I don't know how controlled or systematic it was.
The bottles were the source for his now classic bottle book. Is that too
early? (1860s? 1870s?)

Feel free to contact me off list if you want more information.

Cathy Spude
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