>[log in to unmask] Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 00:58:31 -0500
>From: Ron May <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Recording Bottle Data

>Carol Serr asked, "How can a dated bottle provide zero
information on
>function of a site?" Many bottles and jars were
manufactured and shipped to
>companies that filled the vessels with a wide range of
contents and the >bottles/jars tell nothing about what the
retailer sold or how the artifact
>functioned in the site. A clear glass bottle could have
held horse linament,
>root beer, food sauce, or snake oil and none would be the
wiser because all
>we often have is a bottle with the manufacturer's mark or
side panel
>embossing. I had hoped for new definitions of contents
based on lip shapes,
>side decorations, or bases (not solely on basal marks or
side embossing).
>After paper labels were invented and embossing vanished,
functional
>intepretation got almost impossible to discern. And, yes,
there are
>documented examples of scavengers selling recycled glass
>bottles to beverage retailers.
>Ron May
>Legacy 106, Inc.

I raised this work in a different context in the last month,
but Ron's general point is supported by what I believe to be
an important paper in the Australian literature:

Carney, M. 'A Cordial Factory at Parramatta, New South
Wales', Australasian Historical Archaeology 16: 80-93.

Martin Carney demonstrated in this paper how an
over-reliance on functional interpretations of perceived
bottle contents (combined with some misinterpretation of the
site stratigraphy) led to the misinterpretation of an entire
site.

Because fixed assumptions were made about the bottles as
'alcohol-related', the original site interpretation missed
the bottle-related technological evidence that the site was
in fact a cordial factory rather than a pub/hotel.

There's much more detail in the original paper, but it
serves as an excellent warning on the dangers of an
over-reliance on pre-determined functional categories in
glass (and indeed other material culture) analysis.

Not for a second am I trying to claim that function is
somehow unimportant or impossible to access, just supporting
Ron's basic point that the potentially tricky issue of
polyfunctionality can make this particularly complicated for
bottles.

Alasdair Brooks