Adventure cyclist, climber, archaeologist, designer, artist, strategist. Intensely curious, I explore, do and create. It's sort of a compulsion. I live for open ended questions and opportunities to go fast and deep in the pursuit of understanding and acquisition of knowledge and new skills.
Glass, it's been in every historic site I have ever worked on. Even digs in what look like empty fields usually contain glass and it's usually broken bottles of one kind or another. Sometimes it serves as a nice indicator of the era you are dealing with and whether or not you have cleared disturbed soil or are simply in historic strata. In short, it's useful. Especially if you learn to tell machine made bottles from mouth blown, not dead simple but an off the cuff indicator that you are working with something post 1903 is the presence of machine made bottles. Pretty cool. 1903 was the year a guy by the name of Michael Owens unveiled what the Corning glass company calls the most significant advance in glass production on over 2000 years.
The knowledge of how to go about dating bottles can be gained in a number of ways, field and lab work, hours of nosing through antique stores and eBay or, thankfully, via a handy site run by a Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management employee! Whew that's a lot of bureau but it's a great resource laid out so you can look at an artifact and run through a series of questions to help pin point the date of a given bottle within ten years or so of it's date of manufacture. Absolutely worth checking out if you have even minor interest in the topic.
With my dig kit packed away in an obscure corner, I needed a new trowel. Add that to curiosity about the resurrected Marshalltown moniker and it was a win for getting one.
Seems like it's still a solid tool and made here in the states but the joint at the blade looks different from my old ones. I'll have to pull my dig kit anyway so I can compare the new and old as well as check the Marshalltown site but it looks like maybe? something other than drop forging and the Marhsalltown name is printed on instead of embossed. Beyond that its the same old reliable 45-5 London pointing trowel from field school and CRM digs past. Same new(dull) edge too, now where did I put my file?
Neat little piece of Talavera, or Majolica as it's listed in the site reports. Colorful tin-glazed pottery. Surface glaze looks about the same and geographical and chronological context would make sense for either type but the clay body isnt red. I think Talavera makes more sense but I have not done much historic archaeology in California yet. What is certain is I like pulling this stuff out of the ground!
