Please forgive the cross-posting:
The comments by Alan and Ron are very important, but more
needs to be added. An important question is: How representative is
Alan's bottle? Although some discussion on deposition lag is present
in the literature, more research needs to be conducted. I argue that
reuse, curation, and other post-depositional prosesses vary according
to bottle type and geographic location (along with such other factors
as economic status of the end-user and situational experiences).
One of the reasons that returnable soda bottles were added to
the trash by the bottles' owners (only the bottler actually owned the
bottles--the purchaser of the contents was legally and/or morally
obligated to return the container) was because the embossing on the
bottle became badly worn due to case wear and the harsh chemicals
used in cleaning and sterilizing long before the rest of the bottle
was damaged. Paper labeled bottles experienced a much longer
use-span because there was no embossing to show early wear. Medicine
and drug store bottles probably had less turn-around and, therefore,
lasted longer than soda bottles.
The story of a single bottle rarley offers enough information
for dating purposes. By using a large quantity of glass for dating,
discrepancies (such as one or a few bottles that show false dates due
to deposition lag) should either disappear or at least show up as
outliers. The larger the sample, the more likely it is to reflect the
reality of the population.
In addition, some bottles are far more dateable than others. Local
bottles, especially soda bottles usually had predictably short life
spans prior to final deposition into the archaeological record. for
a better discussion on soda bottle dating and deposition lag, see:
http://alamo.nmsu.edu/~lockhart/EPSodas/Chapter1-4/chap2.htm
Bill
> I am working on an inventory of a drug store museum in Georgia and made an
> observation that may be of interest. The museum houses several thousand
> artifacts covering the period from the late 19th century to about 1950, an
> interesting period of major change in the pharmaceutical industry. The
> availability of paper labels on medicines and containers full of advertising
> makes the artifacts rich in information. One medicine contained a bottle of
> liquid and a glass vial of powder. The base of the bottle was embossed with
> an Owens Illinois logo indicating that the bottle had been manufactured
> between 19ll and 1929 (Griffenhagen and Bogard, 1999). The base of the vial
> was embossed "TCW Co." indicating that the vial had been made by the T. C.
> Wheaton Glass Manufacturer between 1900 and 1920 (Griffenhagen and Bogard,
> 1999). Taken together, one might be tempted to assume that the medicine in
> the vial was marketed around 1911-1920. However, this was a package of
> Penicillin G, which didn't become available to the general public until
> after World War II. The package contained an expiration date of November
> 1953, suggesting that the penicillin was probably sold near that date.
> There appears to be a significant gap between the date the bottle was
> manufactured and the date it was used for a product. One can imagine a
> number of scenarios to explain the time gap (e.g. reuse of bottles, use of
> old bottles, etc.), but the salient point is that it is not safe to rely too
> heavily on the bottle manufacturing dates for dating a product.
>
> Allen Vegotsky
> [log in to unmask]
>
Bill Lockhart
New Mexico State University
Alamogordo, NM
(505) 439-3732
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