I've enjoyed reading this thread despite the rather acrimonious start,
     and have agreed with most of what the contributors have had to say
     about drinking, both of alcoholic beverages, and of patent medicines
     and pharmaceuticals. Can't help sticking my nose in again to address
     two or three comments:
 
HEATHER GRIGGS: "My second point is that patent medicines are also
considerably more expensive than booze.  Why drink a $1 bottle of Radway's
Ready Remedy when you could have a 5 cent shot of whiskey or bottle of beer
at your local (pub)?  I understand that stereotypes may hold the seeds of
truth, but you must consider who's truth that is.  To the Irish, from
inside their world, there is a completely different cultural approach.
Mind you I'm not addressing Catholic temperence groups...that's another
issue."
 
     Why drink Radway's Ready Remedy at $1 a bottle when you could have a 5
     cent shot of which at your local pub? Because you might just be a
     woman in about 1900. That's more than half of the population. In my
     dissertation, I compared 14 family household collections with 10
     bachelor male household collections and found the families yielded
     almost four times the relative frequency of liquor bottles than in the
     bachelor male households. Furthermore, the families had almost three
     times the relative frequency of patent medicines and pharmaceuticals.
     Of course, if you were male, you COULD get a 5-cent shot of whiskey to
     cure thirst or ameliorate the effects of a bad cold. But if you were a
     "decent" woman, you drank whatever you drank at home, not in public.
 
     I guess that was what I was getting at in an earlier posting when I
     commented that the New Orleans study might have been seeing gender
     instead of ethnicity. If their comparable collections came from a
     household context of bachelor men (who took their spirits in public),
     and the study collection was from a family context, then it might
     APPEAR that the Irish drank more than the non-Irish comparative
     collection.
 
     So in reply to Lauren Cook's statement "...most urban dwellings
     contain members of more than one gender, making it difficult to
     contrast assemblages according to gender," I reply that it might be
     difficult, but not impossible. I found at least 10 sites that had only
     men on them. Comparing them to households of mixed gender can indeed
     be instructive.
 
     My point is that of course, there are many variables that can go into
     this sort of equation: gender might be only one, ethnicity another,
     economic class a third, etc. etc. Until we archaeologists start to
     think hard about the questions we ask BEFORE we ask them, we might
     well come up with some stereotypical answers, having nothing better to
     fall back on.
 
     And speaking of Catholic temperance groups, I also excavated a privy
     filled with trash from a Catholic priest, dated to 1918. That was two
     years after local prohibition had been enacted. At first, I thought
     the very high relative frequency of liquor bottles in the pit
     reinforced a certain stereotype of Catholics during prohibition. But
     in a comparison with family collections of apparently "wet" and "dry"
     persuasions, I found that the priest drank no more than the average
     "wet" household. What he DID seem to have more of--in comparison to
     the family households--was several times more non-alcoholic beverage
     bottles, in particular, grape juice bottles. I believe the man was
     actually being temperate. He came from an aristocratic Italian
     background, and was no doubt used to having wine with his meals. When
     prohibition hit, he finished off his supply, tossed it into the
     abandoned privy pit (so the trash collector couldn't spread rumors),
     and substituted grape juice at his table.
 
     Of course, I can't prove that, but at least I didn't call the good
     father a lush, either.