Graham Knuckey’s comments on differences in glass distribution
between sites within the English colonial world and other countries such,
as the United States is an interesting one. I had the good fortune to
spend seven years working in the glass section of Parks Canada center for
material culture research in Ottawa. That gave me an opportunity to get to
know assemblages from Canadian sites in addition to my exposure to
artifacts from American sites. There are some significant differences.
English Excise Taxes on glass that lasted (if memory serves me correctly)
until the mid-1840s imposed various restrictions on such things as the
types of glass that could be used to produce different sizes of bottles and
how those bottles were taxed. In addition, bottles that were exported were
given a drawback that subsidized the export of English glass, which was
being paid for by the English consumers. Because of the Excise taxes on
glass containers the English produced more small stoneware containers such
as ink, shoe polish and beer. The impact of this can be seen on
assemblages from British military sites from the late eighteenth century
through the 1840s when compared to American sites from the same period.
The samples being dealt with in Ottawa were heavily weighted toward
military sites. There is a much higher proportion of small stoneware
bottles on the British military sites than on contemporary American sites.
In addition, there was a period in the early nineteenth century when
English bottles under six ounces of size had to be blown in lead glass.
Other English bottles, because of the use of coal for a fuel, tends to be
the heavily weighted to black glass bottles. The American industry
produced a lot of bottles in lighter green glass because wood was commonly
the fuel of choice and there were not any restrictions such as those
imposed by the English Excise Taxes.
Another thing to keep in mind is that a number of the bottles
developed for English patent and proprietary medicines became generic
shapes that were made in a number of countries. For example, the Whitall,
Tatum & Co. (from southern New Jersey) still listed Turlington’s, British
Oils, Bateman’s Drops, Darby’s Carminative, Godfrey’s Cordial and others in
their 1880 catalog. Some of these types of bottles continued to be
produced into the machine-made period in the early twentieth century. I
have seen them listed as “reproductions” and “fakes,” but that is not the
case because the production of these bottles and their medicines continued
well into the twentieth century. Olive Jones has published two excellent
studies on this subject. One was on the Essence of Peppermint bottle and
the other was on the London Mustard bottle.
In the twentieth century, the Owens automatic-bottle blowing machine
and later the I.S. bottle-blowing machine became wide spread around the
world. International brands became more common and their bottles are easy
to identify. Is there any place that the Coke bottle does not show up?
Tony McNichol and I are continuing to work on the chronology of
machine-made bottles and we will be presenting a workshop on them at the
Council for Northeast Historical Archaeology conference in October in
Trenton, New Jersey. Our preliminary paper on the chronology of bottles
made on the Owens bottle-blowing machine is available as well as a
bibliography on machine-made bottles for those that are interested.
Contact me off line and I will be glad to send copies as an attachment.
Peace,
George L. Miller
URS Corporation
437 High Street
Burlington, New Jersey 08016
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