Walk in the Parkeology

 My archeology pals overseas are always picking up odd little bits of artifacts.  Bits and pieces of pottery and such from the Roman era on down.  Here in the US of course it is much harder.  I suppose there are arrowheads and such in some places but you have to look long and hard for them, and have your eye "tuned" for same.

Which is not to say that I don't come across anything on my frequent walks.  On one of my usual routes I go through a city park and recently started noticing bits of glass at the base of a hillside.  Over a couple of trips, and helped by heavy rains, I picked up a glittering pile of shards.  So what can be learned from them?

Here's the collection.  It is mostly shards of thick glass, the sort you find with beer bottles or especially soda bottles.  They have to be thick to handle the pressure of carbonation.

Most of the identifiable shards are from the Alb. Nunke soda bottling works of Chippewa Falls.  This makes sense, his factory was not far from the park, although I should point out it is NOT at the site of my finds.  (For some reason digging up hillsides for objects of minimal value remains popular!)

There were examples of both small and large Nunke bottles.  Here's what the smaller size looks like in one piece.

But there were some other things in the assemblage as well.  This base has the markings of the Wisconsin Glass Company of Milwaukee.  It is a bit early for Nunke, and none of his bottles are known to bear this marking.  It might have been a competitor's bottle that came his way as a misplaced return.  These usually were tossed.

But I don't think that this collection of discards was directly related to the Nunke bottling works. There were some other bottle fragments as well, things that had nothing to do with soda pop.  This shard is of a particularly notorious patent medicine, Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup.

This medicine was first marketed in 1845, and despite increasing criticism and scrutiny it was still being sold in the 1930's.  It claimed to ease the discomfort of infants with teething or colic.  And it probably did, as it contained alcohol and morphine.  There were many deaths associated with the use of this and similar concoctions.

So what to actually make of these findings?  Probably not much.  The location would not fit as a dump for Nunke bottles, and in any event such sites would have thousands of fragments, not dozens.  It is not likely to be someone's household dump either, it is along a road that would not have had houses on it in the 1885-1910 time frame that is represented by these shards.  Remains of a picnic?  Well, maybe.  The area became a park in 1906, and the only thing definitively older is the mid 1880's Wisconsin Glass Co base.  But more likely this was just "stuff" tossed over a hillside.  That's been human behaviour from time immemorial.