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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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.


yeah, that is the big give away as far as I was concerned
 

i found it in the PNW
 

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.

no, it is not melted...it has no inclusions, the one side is smooth and flat as a sheet of paper. Like I said, it appears it once was round and dome shaped but not a magnifying glass. It is not a older or crude piece of glass at all.
 

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