I hate digging. Around the Root Simple compound, if you dig deeper than six inches and you hit a layer of hard packed clay entwined with tree roots and chunks of concrete. At least my digging efforts yield the artifacts of previous inhabitants in addition to the raw material for adobe ovens.
While recovering from a bad cold this weekend I fell deep into the hole that is the Historic Glass Bottle Identification and Information Website created by a retired Bureau of Land Management Rangeland Management Specialist, Bill Lindsey. While the bulk of the internet consist of intemperate tweets and cats, it still has useful information like Lindsey’s bottle website which was created to, “assist archaeologists with the dating, identification and classification of historic bottles and bottle fragments located during cultural surveys and excavations.” You can lose a lot of hours on this site marveling at the design details and uses of old bottles. There’s a handy page for dating bottles, scans of antique bottle catalogs, and page after page of bottle types.
My unintended archaeological efforts have yielded no Spanish doubloons, viking graves or Anasazi ruins, but I have found lots of glassware, mostly broken milk bottles. I’ve also discovered what I think are cheap perfume bottles like the one above. If you know what this bottle contained please leave a comment. I suspect perfume, because this tiny bottle has a very narrow, flow restricting opening.
What have you found while digging on your homestead?
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oh, cool! thanks for the link!
we’ve found a couple marbles, an arrowhead, and a teeny bottle that I’m now looking forward to cleaning up and inspecting more closely.
It seems like the website itself is an artifact of a previous internet 🙂 How charming to see a site with current information in the visual language of the late nineties. Makes me nostalgic. Although–not too much.
Could be perfume, but I believe it to be an aftershave bottle.
I think you may be right.
or medicine?
Could be but I think it would be a little bigger if it was a medicine bottle.
I live on 1/2 acre at the edge of a small, South Texas town. From old maps I learned that my property was once part of someone’s ranch. I have a sealed-up well and a variety of windmill parts. I have seen mobiles made from old windmill parts. I might try that. I have also found pieces of old bottles (not enough to identify them, though) and some broken china. Someday, I hope to borrow a metal detector.
We live in the Green Mountains. What have we dug up?
Rocks.
Big rocks. Big honkin’ rocks. Boulders. Smallish rocks. Tiny rocks.
Clusters of rocks on top of other rocks with small amounts of something like dirt in between. Someday, I tell myself, we will have fine garden soil, but it’s going to be a long haul.
Ugh!
Sounds like where I lived when I lived north of Mr. and Mrs. Homegrown in the La Crescenta area. We called it Rock Crescenta. My husband used to take truck loads of rocks to the dump every year only to have them all magically reappear the next spring. Couldn’t dig down more then 6″ without hitting rocks. All sizes! Now I live in an area where rocks have to be purchased! Crazy!
How about food coloring? My mom had some really small bottles of food coloring in tiny bottles that came 4 in a small box like the little plastic ones do today. How tall is this bottle?
In my previous yard, I found a horseshoe and several pieces of glass big enough to identify as 60s-to-70s era baking/freezer dishes. In my current yard over the last 7-8 years, I’ve found probably hundreds of pieces of thin window, maybe plant nursery glass – I know this because I also found several large (like bigger than 4x4ft) pieces of glass, still with some packaging separating the sheets. I’ve also found several needle caps and a few syringes (no needles, so far). I’ve also dug up many pieces of soda/beer bottles, of varying vintage. And every frost/thaw cycle heaves up more glass left from whenever ago. This doesn’t count the endless bits of garbage that blow in – we’re in an area where we’re next door to one and across the street from another mini-mart, so there’s all that garbage blowing into both front and back yard, plus then we get bigger winds that get funneled through the valley and freeway system and happen to come right up into our neighborhood, so the garbage gets pushed further into the backyard and lodged solidly in any trees or bushes.
I live in an 1896 house in Oakland. Over the years, we have done a lot of digging to grade and flatten our yard (because the whole neighborhood drains into my crawl space), and we’ve found huge piles of glass, a victorian boiler or hot water heater (thought that was a pipe and called 811 and after all the utilities disclaimed it, we kept digging and found it was not connected to anything, just a big cylinder), and dozens, maybe hundreds of dish shards, bottles, bottle shards, etc. I found this guide (different part of Oakland, but similar artifacts!) and recognized so many of the pieces. http://www.dot.ca.gov/dist4/documents/digging_west_oakland.pdf
I loved the discussion of different cultures in Oakland and the different types of artifacts found based on the occupants. It’s really a fun read even if you don’t live here and I bet LA is similar in many ways.
One thing, apparently when people got indoor plumbing in the 20s and the 30s, they started using their outhouse holes for garbage. Which would explain the strange concentration of garbage (not wide but deep) in several areas of the yard. My husband learned that and was like, yay? But century old poop is pretty inoffensive. 🙂
We found a Boy Scout coin that had been used for target practice–bullet hole right though the middle. We keep in in a little box of curiosities on the coffee table. We also found a 55-gal drum buried upright, but deemed it too much effort to extract so we just recovered it. We just hope there isn’t a body or something worse in there…
Ugh, I’d be worried it’s full of fuel that has leaked everywhere. Was there a smell like gas around it? I deal with remediation of buried fuel tanks in my job. Some petroleum contaminants are quite volatile and can seep up through the soil and into structures, etc. I don’t want to alarm you, but if you think that might be the case, you should have it checked out.