Lauren Campbell
My time at field school has gone by so fast, but the first few days seem like forever ago! When we first started out at BcGn-17, we were all super excited to find any sort of artifacts in our screens, especially for those of us who started in OA3, which did not yield the most interesting or abundant of finds. Then, last week we moved to BcGn-15, where we were given the freedom to choose where we wanted to set up our 2x2m test units. Most people rushed to set up near where the house was thought to be, however, Cam, Maddy, Avery, and I chose an area a bit farther away from the group, in a little clearing, which would soon become OA7.
We thought that the area might cover the laneway or the exterior of the house. At first, we were not the most hopeful about our unit, as we did not excavate any features or tightly-packed gravel that would be associated with a laneway of some kind. As we continued to excavate, we found a large amount of nails, glass, and ceramic sherds. It’s crazy to think how quickly I went from “oh wow, a 1x1cm piece of glass, yay!” to “seriously, another nail?”. Our unassuming OA7 quickly became quite fruitful, as we had an array of notable finds, including the buggy step, which Kate posted about earlier, a switch cover, a couple of electrical sockets, pages from a book, and several complete, or almost complete, glass bottles. The most interesting one to me was one specific bottle that we found with liquid still inside of it!
Avery was the one to originally find the bottle, just skimming her shovel over the side of it and somehow not breaking it.
We carefully excavated the bottle, which to our surprise, remained in one piece, and had a very distinct cap, with the name “Jordan” and a logo with grapes.
After finding this, I tried to do some research to find out what this bottle contained. Given the grapes on the logo, I hypothesized that at one point in time it was a bottle of wine or grape juice. I thought that a reverse image search of the distinct bottle cap would help answer this question, however, it sadly did not yield any helpful results. I could not find any images of the same or similar logos. Upon further research, I discovered that there was a Canadian company called “Jordan Wines” from 1920 to 1973, before the company was renamed “Jordan & Ste Michelle” and then bought out by Bright in 1986. I was able to find images of some of their bottles, which did not bear much resemblance to the one we found, and did not appear to have the same logo.
I also could not find any information about a “Jordan” grape juice company, leaving many questions unanswered about our mysterious bottle. Although I could not determine what the bottle originally contained, it was still an incredibly interesting find, and I am hopeful that someone else with more experience with artifacts may be able to gain more insight into the bottle!
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