The University of Maine’s athletic mascot has for more than a century been Bananas T. Bear, a fearsome black bear played by a succession of students that runs onto the field or skates onto the ice to pump up the crowd during games.
In its early decades, however, the part of Bananas was played by a real, live Maine black bear — something that would be illegal and considered cruel today but was, until 1966, seen as a fun part of campus life at UMaine.
Last summer, some UMaine researchers undertook an archaeological dig to try to find the remains of the building where for years groups of fraternity brothers would keep the bears that played Bananas — and hopefully the remains of some of the bears themselves.
Under the leadership of anthropology professor Daniel Sandweiss and Gretchen Faulkner, director of UMaine’s Hudson Museum, a ten-person team spent a week in late August excavating the site of the pump house along the Stillwater River, also known as the “Bear’s Den,” where various bears were held until the 1930s.
According to PhD candidate Elizabeth LeClerc, who worked on the dig, life for the bears held in captivity was not ideal, with some only living for a few years while they were mascots.
“We know anecdotally that the fraternity was feeding them food scraps, leftovers, and at least several of the bears died from food poisoning,” LeClerc told the Maine Campus, UMaine’s student newspaper. “We were hoping to identify food remains so we can see in better detail what kind of things the bears were being fed, what their diets were and how they were being taken care of.”
While the researchers were not able to find any bones or other remains of the bears, they did identify the site of the building, and found a number of artifacts dated to roughly between 1890 and 1930, including fragments of glass, part of a shoe and large amounts of coal and slag.
The research team plans to continue excavating the area each year, as it provides valuable field experience for anthropology and archaeology students at UMaine, and helps to paint a better picture of what life was like at UMaine a century ago.
