Culture Embossed: A Study of Wine Bottle Seals

Summary

Over the course of the eighteenth century, consumer goods became widely available to larger segments of the colonial population through the local retail system. As access to an array of goods opened to consumers across the socio-economic spectrum, one way that the colonial gentry distinguished themselves and communicated their social standing and pedigree was through the application of initials, names, crests, and coats of arms to otherwise indistinguishable items of material culture. Recently, archaeologists and collectors have published substantial datasets of wine bottle seals that make this class of artifacts a small find no longer and instead one ripe for archaeometric analysis. The seals embossed on English-manufactured wine bottles offer a case study to explore the very personal experience of constructing identity and the shared transformations entangled in becoming American at the regional and trans-Atlantic scale.    

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions) 2018   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 1038