Historical archaeology context usually present a difficult challenge when we try to have an absolute date for an archaeological context. Most of the time, radio carbon dating is difficult to use especially in the Caribbean region where the soil acidity, root penetration and others natural sample contaminators make this kind of dating method rather imprecise or impracticable.
BOTTLES as dating flag
In my opinion, old bottles offer a good opportunity for absolute dating specially when we have a good collection of bottles or fragments of them. Others objects like pottery, metal or ceramic usually found in historical archaeological context are more difficult to use due to the long range of use after manufacturing . Lets see some examples:
- If we recover a porcelain with enough detail with it, we can find the date and place of manufacture, however this kind of object can be use for centuries after manufacture because of it usually great value, making difficult to date this specific layer into a narrow period of time (in this case we have a period of time like a century)
- If we found a bottle we can easily estimate a narrow date by its fabrication method and others intrinsic information. In this case we are assuming that common bottles (beer, table wine, etc) were discarded almost immediately after being consumed and not used as container, for collection or others purpose. We believe that this assumption is correct in most cases and hence the great dating possibilities of bottles versus other objects.
A good link for bottle dating can be found at http://www.blm.gov/historic_bottles/
