A Provenience Analysis of Glass Wine Bottle Seals and the Commodification of Household Goods in Early Eighteenth-Century Colonial Virginia
Author(s): Eric Schweickart
Year: 2025
Summary
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
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In this presentation I use a pXRF analysis of the chemical composition of glass wine bottle seals recovered from John Custis IV’s manor house in Williamsburg, Virginia to investigate the development of mercantile networks in the early 18<sup>th</sup> century British Atlantic world. Utilizing the documentary and archaeological record related to this planter and merchant, I will show how British tobacco factors changed their interactions with manufacturers over the course of the first 4 decades of the 1700s to meet the demands of planters. As Bristol-based merchants worked to compete with their London colleagues, they increased the speed that they could get Virginian planters their goods by splitting up the orders between multiple manufacturers. This process served to further obscure the relationship between the producers and consumers of household goods, increasing the commodification of everyday objects circulating in the mercantile networks of the Atlantic World and leading to the rise of consumerism in both the new world and the old.
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Cite this Record
A Provenience Analysis of Glass Wine Bottle Seals and the Commodification of Household Goods in Early Eighteenth-Century Colonial Virginia. Eric Schweickart. Presented at The 90th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2025 ( tDAR id: 510737)
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Record Identifiers
Abstract Id(s): 52315