my best "not" artifact!

unclemac

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I found this on the beach the other day. It is made of clear glass and it is my "best" not an artifact. If I had found it in Australia I would have no doubt that it is what it appears to be...a scraper... I mean LOOK at it, it is the right size, the right shape, it has edge work all the way around it, it has reduction flaking across the top, it even has a thumb divot! But the material is wrong, wrong, wrong. I mean to say, clear glass, with a smooth and flat back, no imperfections in the glass, and when you look at it, it appears to have been a circular, dome shaped object...not a bottle bottom for sure. Love to hear your opinions!
 

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That's fascinating. Was it common for Native Americans to use glass post contact? I found a piece of old green glass in a creek that I could have sworn was worked but tossed it back...because it was just glass..
 

Top of insulator? Hard to tell from pics
 

Glass that clear and thick wasn't really used much until the early 20th century, for what its worth.
 

Could it have been a magnifying glass???
 

That's fascinating. Was it common for Native Americans to use glass post contact? I found a piece of old green glass in a creek that I could have sworn was worked but tossed it back...because it was just glass..

not unheard of but certainly not common, dark green-black glass from bottles and out west red railroad glass. My object is way off base as a material.
 

Glass that clear and thick wasn't really used much until the early 20th century, for what its worth.

yep, that is what i think too...but just look at it! If it were stone or obsidian there would be no question.
 

On the other hand, people use glass all the time for flint knapping these days. It could be someone's reject they just tossed on the beach. Out here on the ocean beaches, they leave us Spanish reales with the word "copy" on them and assorted worthless foreign coins!
 

On the other hand, people use glass all the time for flint knapping these days. It could be someone's reject they just tossed on the beach. Out here on the ocean beaches, they leave us Spanish reales with the word "copy" on them and assorted worthless foreign coins!

...that's a cruel joke.
 

...that's a cruel joke.


we had a post a few years back of a fellow that was picking up obsidian blades from a single spot by the bucket....turns out it was someone's practice, the give a way (as i remember it) was the different styles representing different time periods all mixed together.
 

we had a post a few years back of a fellow that was picking up obsidian blades from a single spot by the bucket....turns out it was someone's practice, the give a way (as i remember it) was the different styles representing different time periods all mixed together.

I feel so bad for whoever that was. I remember when I was little my grandparents dumped a bunch of pyrite and other rocks that are unusual in the area into the creek at their property and told me there was a vein of the stuff upstream; I was pretty upset when I realized they put it there. lol.
 

yep ma salted a find for me once....60 years ago....I still remember that
 

Very nice. Definitely worth keeping. In what part of the country was this found?

It was not uncommon in the early historic time for the native Americans to use items like that glass to manufacture their own tool.

It the early historic time some tribes shied away from any materials from the white culture while others sometimes used them. Some embraced the foreign culture.

It could be a scraper made from broken glass recently made like others have said. Smokey has a point that the glass does not look like early historic time glass.
 

Looks like lead glass from the pics.
Not produced in the Colonies until early 1700's.
Not likely Native American.
Could it have been melted?


From Wiki:

A very important advance in glass manufacture was the technique of adding lead oxide to the molten glass; this improved the appearance of the glass and made it easier to melt using sea-coal as a furnace fuel. This technique also increased the "working period" of the glass, making it easier to manipulate. The process was first discovered by George Ravenscroft in 1674, who was the first to produce clear lead crystal glassware on an industrial scale. Ravenscroft had the cultural and financial resources necessary to revolutionise the glass trade, allowing England to overtake Venice as the centre of the glass industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Seeking to find an alternative to Venetian cristallo, he used flint as a silica source, but his glasses tended to crizzle, developing a network of small cracks destroying its transparency. This was eventually overcome by replacing some of the potash flux with lead oxide to the melt.[42]

He was granted a protective patent in where production and refinement moved from his glasshouse on the Savoy to the seclusion of Henley-on-Thames.[43]

By 1696, after the patent expired, twenty-seven glasshouses in England were producing flint glass and were exporting all over Europe with such success that, in 1746, the British Government imposed a lucrative tax on it. Rather than drastically reduce the lead content of their glass, manufacturers responded by creating highly decorated, smaller, more delicate forms, often with hollow stems, known to collectors today as Excise glasses.[44] The British glass making industry was able to take off with the repeal of the tax in 1845.
 

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