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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