bottles everywhere 10 foot excavation

[swingbeepdig]

I'm clueless when it comes to bottles but at work we excavating property from early 1900s and building highrises.We went over 10 feet deep and got into hard clay, so as deep as 20 feet and found this:







Bottles and pottery coming out of this hole some have pharmaceutical labels from late 1800s.I have bag full so far but are very dirty with black muck.There's a old well made from bricks size of a car about 20 feet deeper full with bottles too.I will pist pictures when I clean them.My question is what else should I be looking for and are these worth anything. Here a picture if a broken one

 

[Thommy]

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Don't know about this one?


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That one green bottle with the deeply indented base is a small wine bottle. Fairly common. But you have a lot of neat patent medicines and ceramics, too. Nice way to start a major collection. Remember to keep track of the provenance of the bottles. If you can get GPS coordinates, that also helps establish provenance. That way, when they leave your hands (for whatever reason) the records of your finds are not lost, and the artifacts do not lose value.

 

[surf]

...Remember to keep track of the provenance of the bottles. If you can get GPS coordinates, that also helps establish provenance. That way, when they leave your hands (for whatever reason) the records of your finds are not lost, and the artifacts do not lose value.

Hello thommy,

I'm not sure I understand you properly. How will GPS coordinates have any bearing on the value of a bottle? Wouldn't "provenance" relate to the person or persons who consumed the contents of these bottles & deposited them in these buried features?

I can see a provenance from the likes of the Charles Gardner Collection effecting value. Provenance on shipwreck artifacts certainly means something, as I know you know. If Swingbeep had determined the history of the site and came up with the news that a celebrated author had lived there, then that nice ink may take on an ultra interesting dimension...

Otherwise, an LH Thomas ink, is an LH Thomas ink, whether a downstream buyer or seller has the GPS coordinates or not. This is just my opinion and experience speaking. Please tell me what I'm missing.

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