Diving For Bottles Again

Dude, some 37th Century archaeologist is going to come back to Sweden in a wormhole and hunt you down. You're messing around with the past!

Ah yes. The signs of occupation activity from settlements of the 60s and 70s. That was the age of Aquarius, as I recall.

I mean the period of Aquarius...

Mike, I helped build the current houses out there, surely that must count for something!?

Ken, haha!

I don't know about Sweden, but here in Finland some people are ready to pay real money for old bottles and pottery. They are used to decorate homes, as a kind of modern curio cabinet.

In Sweden the strata dominated by Vinho Tinto* came to an end with the reform of alcohol pricing.
*the cheapest sort provided by the alcohol-selling monopoly
(BTW If you use beer instead of wine, you ar less likely to be malnourished.)
OT: "If hunger doesn't kill you, it doesn't make you stronger" http://www.nature.com/news/if-hunger-doesn-t-kill-you-it-doesn-t-make-y…
Low crop yields in preindustrial Finland led to decreased fertility and survival during nineteenth-century famine.

(OT) This might have wiped out the Clovis people
"New evidence that cosmic impact caused Younger Dryas extinctions" http://phys.org/news/2013-08-evidence-cosmic-impact-younger-dryas.html#…

Is there reason to believe that the bearers of the Clovis culture were wiped out? Didn't they just quit making Clovis points?

Birger, that "If it doesn't kill you it makes you stronger is one of the biggest lies ever told." In reality, if it doesn't kill you, it weakens you for the next time around. Even stress - the effects of prolonged exposure to excessive stress are found to be cumulative.

I always assumed they stopped making Clovis points because they ran out of megafauna to stick them into.

I wonder who had the bottle of CocaCola.

I believe the Coke was had by the 5th century Frankish king Clovis.

Coca Clovis?

Just make sure to break the teapot and put it under the next building you build. That should be enough penance for your stratigraphic sins.

I just realised, the habit of burying beloved pets near the house may be interpreted as a kind of cult practice.

And since a lot of broken bottles or shards thereof will be found in the soil nearby, the bottle of spirits obviously played a central part in an animistic ritual, with the spirits of the dogs/cats carrying our wishes to the spirit world.

(OT) To quote Life of Brian, "Blessed are the cheesemakers"
http://www.nature.com/news/archaeology-the-milk-revolution-1.13471
So we owe the success of early diary farming to a mutation?

Loki's Castle? Now, all we need is someone to build an underwater city nearby, so future generations can excavate an underwater Pompeji. Bring all bottles you can find. http://www.thelocal.no/20130802/Volcanic-range-discovered-in-Norwegian-… “Volcanic range discovered off Norway”

Birger, I think it's the other way around, we owe the spread of a mutation to the success of early dairy farming.

.. although I do remember the terrible fate that overwhelmed the Slide-Rule people in the late C20th, so these things are not without parallel.
It was either a glacial readvance, or a rise in global temperatures, IIRC. Either way, the Science is settled on this matter.

One time I was poking around in forestry/scrubland in the backend of Aberdeenshire, and came across a ruined farmworker's cottage. Not at all unusual.
What did impress me was the closing deposit, a deeply moss-covered wall of spirits-bottles (I assume whisky) laid horizontally and transverse in the correct drystone construction method, double-faced and necks interlocked.
It was about 700mm high and two bottles wide, and cut off access to the building on two sides, as a lower extension of a normal fieldstone dyke, maybe 10 metres overall.
It was a *very* remote spot, for Britain. Bottles around 2nd quarter of the C20th, I noticed. No sign of collective interments or any untoward ritual activity inside the collapsed structure, I'm happy to report.

You're right, Martin, astute observation. Only a loner could have got away with that sort of 'creative' thing. Hadn't occurred to me.

To bang on about this sort of near-field (in a temporal sense) archaeology a bit more, this house (where I'm sitting) was once tied (as part of the man's "bargain" with his aristocratic employer's agent or "factor"), and again a loosening of old-school mores and standards, and indeed services, at about this time (1920s-'30s) was evidenced by a rubbish-tip at the house end, just over the wall dividing it from a field of fairly good ground, where normally one might expect the farmer not to tolerate such slovenliness and encroachment.
Again, loads of spirits-bottles, all sizes and colours, and many dozens of broken or worn-out (blackened, stem too short) clay tobacco pipes. I had the leisure to excavate this one as part of the process of tidying it away (it's my bloody house!) and along with the meatpaste jars and miscellaneous tin cans, alarm clocks (seriously, like four .. ??) and iron scrap, found a wad of coarse woollen cloth of a greenish colour inside an old enamelled baby-bath. Plus some completely knackered brass buttons and a tiny German coin of the 1890s, 5-pfennig I think.

OK long story short, economy of hypothesis (maybe)? I think a fair few blokes came back from The War with one or two 'issues' they couldn't decently chat with the wife and kids about.
That end wall of the house is solid diorite boulders, and heats up, really nice on the back after sunset, after a hard day beasting it, with a good view of the hills, I've discovered. Ideal spot for a private smoke, and as much whisky as it took to get the nerves right again, and stash baccy, pipes and booze in the rubbish tip away from inquisitive little fingers.
Similar story with wall'o'bottles man?
Many farm-servants were evicted after the Wall Street Crash and ensuing depression, even the farms went for basically "buttons".

The Slide-Rule people are not extinct, you know. Some of us adapted fast enough to survive. (Frankly, after a slide rule and 10 figure log tables, using the first generation of affordable pocket electronic calculators was a doddle - once I got used to that infuriating Reverse Polish notation.)

My daughter has 5 alarm clocks, and we still have to phone her from 7,000 kilometres away to make sure she is on her feet, if not yet actually awake. And she doesn't drink.

I once knew a driller who did superb work. He was working in a remote location, so needed to be supplied with food etc. When asked, he requested one crate of small bottles of CocaCola and one bottle of Johnny Walker whisky for every day that he would be working there. No food required, thank you. After he finished, the crates of empty Coke bottles and the empty whisky bottles were all found very neatly stacked. But I assume one cannot survive on nothing but Coke all day long and a bottle of whisky every night, and continue to do physically demanding work to an excellent standard, forever.

I suspect wall'o'bottles man was not unique. As a student I worked with a lot of men on road construction gangs out in the bush during my university vacations who basically lived on alcohol - being young and naive, I used to try to get them to eat, but those more far-gone just couldn't. As they descended into their own private hell, they went from skilled jobs to doing stuff like emptying the portable latrines, etc. By that stage they didn't weigh much - after they had passed out at night I used to pick them up and carry them back to their huts to put them to bed. It was educational - I never imagined that people lived like that until I saw it.

back in the 50's my scout troop would sink cans and bottles in the remote lakes we took canoe trips thru.in the 60's that of course changed.
thinking back at how many trips were taken by how many groups,just not scouts but loggers,hunters and who knows who the bottom of some of these lakes must be deep in junk.