Meet the 'sea glass archeologist' who sells his art next to Sydney's Big Fiddle

Picking sea glass is a popular Nova Scotia pastime and enthusiasts spend hours combing the province's beaches in search of the colourful, frosted shards, but few know their history.

That's where Mike Baran comes in. Since moving to Cape Breton Island from Calgary 14 years ago, Baran's been fascinated with the treasures.

Known as the "Sea Glass Archeologist," Baran says he can tell how old a piece is and where it came just by looking at it.

He sells his art from a hut beside the Big Fiddle on the Sydney Waterfront. He spoke to CBC's Information Morning Wednesday. 

This is a condensed version of the interview that has been edited for clarity and length.

What is a sea glass archeologist?

Through looking at the pieces of sea glass and from studying glass over the years, I've become what's known as a sea glass archeologist in the international community because I can use the little clues on these little tiny shards of glass to trace them back to their origins and the people that left them there many generations ago.

How did you get into this in the first place?

About 14 years ago, I just wanted something different out of life — I wanted a more meaningful existence connected to nature. So, I sold my house in Calgary and I moved to the Canadian Maritimes.

2008 was a pretty rough year for the whole global economy and unemployment was really high. And here I was — no work at all — and I started finding all these beautiful little pieces of sea glass. 

I put ten things on Ebay for $0.99 and only one thing sold — it was a beautiful little marble, and it actually sold for $36. and that's how the path to sea glass archeology and being a professional beach comber began.

How can you tell how old a piece of glass is?

Fortunately, the history of glass, in North America especially, is actually quite definitive over the last couple of hundred years.

Through repetition and just doing this every day of my life, it just kind of becomes a muscle memory, where you just look at something and you just recognize where it's from and then you're able to trace it to the origins.

What types of sea glass are the most common?

Most types of glass that we encounter on the beach is what I refer to as consumer beverage bottles, unfortunately, and these are the colours of clear and green and brown glass, which somebody would've left on the beaches. And then, the water and the waves come and they pick it up and it tumbles it and breaks it into tiny little pieces. And they just assimilate with the pebbles and become one.

There are places all over the Canadian Maritimes where people would discard their rubbish — known as a rubbish tip or a rubbish cove — into the ocean, and there, we can find all the most amazing and beautiful colours in the world. You can find beautiful pieces of red that were made with gold chloride or you can find nice blues that come from old signalling lenses from trains. I find beautiful, thick pieces of turquoise that originated from old Hemingray insulators that would've been on the top of telephone poles many generations ago.

And [I find] any old artifact that somebody could've thrown into the shoreline — even unique colours like uranium glass that fluoresces under the spectrum of a black light.

What are some of the most unique things you've found?

I once found a piece of a handle from a cup, and after diligent research, I traced it to something that was made in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the 1880s by the Atterbury Glass Company. It's amazing to think that somebody would've brought this cup by train or by horse all the way to Cape Breton Island 140 years ago to help work in the coal mines, where it was lost in the sea for me to discover.

Another amazing artifact that I found once is known as a Saint Michael's token. A Saint Michael's token was a good luck charm for fishermen out here. And I didn't really know this until all the locals started telling me the stories that a fisherman would not be caught dead without the Saint Michael's token. Finding it on the shoreline tells me that a fisherman probably lost this in one of the 25,000 shipwrecks that have taken place [in] Nova Scotia over the last 500 years.

How can you tell if a beach is going to be good for sea glass?

We're not going to find sea glass unless we have people. So, the best way that I find sea glass is in these old mining communities where everybody would've just thrown their discards into the ocean. 

The formula is one bottle per person per year went into that shoreline for that area. So, if 20,000 people lived there, we can estimate that 20,000 bottles would've been going into that area — that ocean — until about the 1960s, when garbage collection started. 

The way you're talking about this — it sounds like beach glass doesn't actually travel that far from where it enters the ocean?

I've come to learn that the sea glass definitely stays in the same place that it was discarded.

I have a YouTube video where I'm out in Table Head in Glace Bay — and this is where [Guglielmo] Marconi sent his first transatlantic signals — I found a neat little piece of yellow glass and then doing the research, I was able to match it to one of his transistor tubes that he was using in that exact spot in Table Head 119 years ago.

By the Low Point Lighthouse on Cape Breton Island, I find these very thick pieces of yellow glass and I traced them to the old Fresnel lens that was installed into that lighthouse about three or four generations ago — and I don't find it anywhere else but within a few hundred metres of that area.

If someone was interested in getting into sea glass archeology, how would they go about doing that?

I don't think that there's an actual path to becoming a sea glass archeologist — it really is a career that I made up for myself and then I kind of backed into.

If somebody really wanted to become a sea glass archeologist, they would have to spend a lot of time just researching and just loving what they do — loving the bottles, loving the glass and just, you know, [immersing] themselves full-time into that.

Social media and the internet are a great way of doing research. So, I would recommend, if you want to learn more about marbles, you can join a marble collecting guild, or if you want to learn more about uranium glass or even antique glass, you can just join an antique collectors guild on a group such as on Facebook. 

There are a lot of great sea glass groups out there, such as my own, where people can send me a photograph of what they found and ask me, 'Hey, what is the origin behind this find?' and I'm always happy to share my knowledge with them.

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