All,

I am putting a call out for folks who might be willing to sacrifice
parts of a few Chinese medicine bottles for a project I am working on
with some chemists here at Idaho.  Specifically, we are looking to
chemically 'fingerprint' glass from medicine bottles from a number of
locations in the West.  The idea being that by indentifying chemically
similar vessels in a variety of different locations we can track some of
the movement of goods between Chinese communities in the West.   A
couple of key points to note.  This  a destructive process, we will need
to use a piece of glass about the size of a fingernail for testing.
Second, we are looking to about 3-5 bottles from numerous different
locations so the ideal would be if you have  a few fragments of vials
already in your collections - we don't have the budget to test 20 or 30
bottles from a single location (though that might be interesting to do
as well.    I won't overwhelm you with details but if you are interested
and have some bottles we could test I would appreciate it.   If
interested please contact me off list at [log in to unmask]  or call me
at 208.885.5954

 

 

Best,

 

Mark Warner

Associate Professor of Anthropology

University of Idaho