Pit 46: Level 2

Completed August 25, 2013 by Debbie Bloom, Jim Merrill, Dean Hunt, DC Locke, and David Brinkman. The pottery really started coming in level 2... but first.. getting back to the glass bottle find of level 1: A picture below shows me holding a bottle top from pit 8 and the bottle bottom piece from level 1 of this pit (46). Pit 8 was in the far corner of the back yard and produced mostly modern day artifacts but this green glass bottle top was the exception. Another image below shows drawings of common Colonial period liquor bottles. When dealing with small broken pieces like we find in Granby, you really need to find the very top and bottom of a bottle to identify it with these drawings. The unique combination of the top and bottom design makes it possible to date a bottle type to about 5 or 10 years. The shape of our pit 46 bottom piece is similar to several bottles between the years of 1761 and 1809 but, when you look at the bottle top (same type of green glass) it narrows it down to just the 1804 bottle. The mouth design and size (outside diameter of 1.5") are the same and, maybe even more unique, is the neck piece. The neck is not curved like most bottles and the angle it takes is just like the 1804 bottle. Furthermore, the 1804 bottle was one of the few wide bottles shown in the artifact drawings. The drawing shows it to have a base diameter of just a little less than 4 inches. The base piece we found had a perfect curvature outline on the inside of the piece. It was difficult to measure but we finally took a digital image of it and processed the image to extract this curvature outline. A complete circle was drawn to match the curvature and the diameter of the circle ended up being 3.85 inches. It was a fat bottle matching the base measurement of the 1804 bottle! This is a very important find because it's the first real date we have on this green bottle glass which we are finding in about 75% of the pits. 1804 is also a special year because we have the 1800 census which shows John Friday living in Granby and it is documented that he had a tavern in his home during this period of time. DC's theory is that, because of the high numbers of liquor glass found, maybe this property was home to a pub at one time.

Pit 46: Level 2 produced: 34 pieces of pottery, 24 pieces of glass, 12 nails, 6 iron pieces, 2 Native American pieces (pottery and chert), and a pipe bowl piece.

Below are images showing the digital (threshold) processing done to extract the curvature of the bottle's base and ultimately, the diameter of the base which, like the bottle's top measurements matched, exactly, the 1804 bottle.