It's Your Shout! A New Way of Measuring Use Wear on Glass Bottles

Abstract

It was not until 1922 that glass manufacturing was available in New Zealand and prior to this, glass bottles were considered valuable and useful objects. This lack of glass encouraged reuse. Reuse has implications for consumption analyses and the interpretation of bottle glass assemblages but to date there has been no systematic method of documenting this. The following research examines if it is possible to quantify evidence of wear on glass bottles in a way that can be applied to archaeological specimens.

With the presumption that continued use of a bottle will leave physical evidence, a scale was produced for measuring the use wear on glass bottles. The scale was then employed on five different sites located in Christchurch. These sites consisted of a warehouse/brewery, a pub/inn, a bottle exchange and two domestic sites. The aim was to discover if it was possible to measure use wear on glass bottles and to see if there was any variation in the extent of use wear and, therefore reuse, within these sites and among different bottle types. This enabled the results to be used to contribute to a broader interpretation of the social life of Victorian Christchurch with an emphasis on the drinking culture of the time.