The Bottles of Feature 9

This past week has been incredibly busy, but unfortunately not in a way that makes for particularly interesting blogs posts (a lot of organizing, numbering, printing, and bagging – very important work, but not the stuff of stories).  As the semester goes on and we get into cataloging, things will pick up – but in the meantime, I figured we could catch up on some of the exciting things that happened LAST semester.

In particular, I’d like to talk about our work on the bottle and glass assemblage from Feature 9, which was a slack-lime pit excavated in 2014 behind the house (some of you may remember the Binghamton students out there digging it!).  Three graduate students from Binghamton teamed up in the fall to analyze the collection, which included almost thirty whole (or mostly whole) bottles – and a whole lot of glass besides.  Having small pieces – what we call sherds – of glass is extremely common for historical archaeology.  What was so great about this particular assemblage was just how many whole bottles we had – this lets us look for important details that clue us in to how, where, and when they were made, as well as what they were used for.

It may come as a surprise to some, but there is actually a lot that we can learn about the past from glass bottles.  Kellam, a second year graduate student, analyzed where the many of the bottles were coming from – sometimes as far away as the east coast.  By looking at this, he was able to get an idea of the different trade networks in place around Castroville during the early 20th century.  Paula, another second year graduate student, looked at what types of things people were buying at the time (right around the 1920s-1940s) and what that said about consumption patterns and habits.  I (Trish) looked at different ways we can interpret bottles to think about lived experiences in the past – for example, what a medicine bottle might tell us about someone’s health and the side effects they might have experienced from taking the medicine.

This is just a very short overview of all three projects, and we will certainly be posting more about our findings.  For now, I’ll include a few pictures of some of the bottles we encountered throughout the semester so y’all can see what we’ve been working with!

Let us know what your favorites are! Any one of these bottles can be a blog post all it’s own (and there’s a good chance they will be!).

Two toilet water bottles – we actually had nine of these exact same ones!

The base of the Orange Crush bottle – bottled by W.B. Wofford and Sons

A Orange Crush bottle – this style is seen in the 1926 Illinois Glass Company catalog

Sloan’s Liniment – marketed as a soothing liniment for sore muscles, aches, and pains

Everyone knows this one! This Coca Cola bottle is the style that was introduced in 1919, though it probably dates to a little bit later than that.

The base of the Coca Cola bottle – bottled in San Antonio, TX