| The glass tools recovered from the excavations at Bloomsbury represent the only material evidence of the ethnic identity of the people who lived there in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Flaked edges of 65 recovered glass fragments had a haze or "bloom" on the surface of the flaking. The presence of bloom indicates that the flaking did not occur recently, and probably dates from the site's occupation period, between c. 1760 and c. 1814.
Seven of these fragments, shown here, were clearly tools produced by flaking in the same manner as flaked stone tools. |
Six of the seven were made on bottle bases. The seventh (lower right, above the text) is a body fragment broken from the case bottle base (lower left, above the text), and bifacially modified after the break occurred. The case bottle base tool has three working edges. The other five tools were made on wine bottle bases. The remaining fragments with bloom on the flake surfaces are much smaller than those identified as tools. Experiments with modern bottle glass have shown that the edge modifications on these fragments can be produced by shoveling and other methods of working the soil. A selection of the fragments with unintentionally modified edges are shown at the bottom of the poster.
Drawings by Kimberly Dugan |
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